"I'm not going to howl; you needn't be afraid. I shall do my work. You won't hear me howl." There were times when she wished he would! She wished it especially when Robert Ferguson wrote that Elizabeth and Blair were going to return to Mercer, that they would live at the River House, and that it was evident that the "annulment," to which at first David's mind had turned so incessantly, was not being thought of. "I understand from Miss White (of course I haven't heard from or written to Mrs. Blair Maitland) that she does not wish to take any steps for a separation," Elizabeth's uncle wrote. "He _must_ see her when she gets back," Helena Richie said, softly; but David said nothing at all. At that moment his suspicion became a certainty; yes, she had loved the fellow! It had been something else than one of her fits of fury! It had been _love_. ... No wonder, with this poison working in him, that he shut even his mother out of his heart. At times the pitying tenderness of her eyes was intolerable to him; he thought he saw the same pity in everybody's eyes; he felt sure that every casual acquaintance was thinking of what had happened to him: he said to himself he wished to God people would mind their business, and let him mind his! "I'm not howling," he told himself. He was like a man whose skin has been taken off; he winced at everything, but all the same, he did his work in the hospital with exhausting thoroughness; to be sure he gave his patients nothing but technical care. Whether they lived or died was nothing to David; whether he himself lived or died was still less to him--except, perhaps, that in his own case he had a preference. But work is the only real sedative for grief, and the suffering man worked himself callous, so he had dull moments of forgetfulness, or at any rate of comparative indifference, Yet when he received that note from Mrs. Maitland summoning him to her hotel he flinched under the callousness. However, at a little before eight o'clock on Tuesday morning, he knocked at her bedroom door. The Girard House knew Sarah Maitland's eccentricities as well as her credit; she always asked for a cheap room, and was always put up under the roof. She had never learned to use her money for her own comfort, so it never occurred to her to have a parlor for herself; her infrequent callers were always shown up here to the top of the house. On this especial morning she had come directly from the train, and when David arrived she was pacing up and down the narrow room, haggard and disheveled from a night in the sleeping-car; she had not even taken off her bonnet. She turned at his step and stopped short in her tracks--he was so thin, so grim, so old! "Well, David," she said; then hesitated, for there was just an instant's recoil in David. He had not realized the fury that would leap up and scorch him like a flame at the sight of Blair's mother.