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After ten years the strangeness of his situation had ceased to be
strange. Always he meant some time to go back to Norada, and there to
clear up certain things, but it was a long journey, and he had very
little time. And, as the years went on, the past seemed unimportant
compared with the present. He gave little thought to the future.
Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.
Just when he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Wheeler he did not know.
He had gone away to the war, leaving her a little girl, apparently, and
he had come back to find her, a woman. He did not even know he was in
love, at first. It was when, one day, he found himself driving past the
Wheeler house without occasion that he began to grow uneasy.
The future at once became extraordinarily important and so also, but
somewhat less vitally, the past. Had he the right to marry, if he could
make her care for him?
He sat in his chair by the window the night after the Homer baby's
arrival, and faced his situation. Marriage meant many things. It meant
love and companionship, but it also meant, should mean, children. Had he
the right to go ahead and live his life fully and happily? Was there
any chance that, out of the years behind him, there would come some
forgotten thing, some taint or incident, to spoil the carefully woven
fabric of his life?
Not his life. Hers.
On the Monday night after he had asked Elizabeth to go to the theater
he went into David's office and closed the door. Lucy, alive to every
movement in the old house, heard him go in and, rocking in her chair
overhead, her hands idle in her lap, waited in tense anxiety for the
interview to end. She thought she knew what Dick would ask, and what
David would answer. And, in a way, David would be right. Dick, fine,
lovable, upstanding Dick, had a right to the things other men had, to
love and a home of his own, to children, to his own full life.
But suppose Dick insisted on clearing everything up before he married?
For to Lucy it was unthinkable that any girl in her senses would refuse
him. Suppose he went back to Norada? He had not changed greatly in ten
years. He had been well known there, a conspicuous figure.
Her mind began to turn on the possibility of keeping him away from
Norada.
Some time later she heard the office door open and then close with
Dick's characteristic slam. He came up the stairs, two at a time as
was his custom, and knocked at her door. When he came in she saw what
David's answer had been, and she closed her eyes for an instant.