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"Aunt Lucy--" he said gently.
She heard him behind her, felt his strong arms as he turned her about.
He drew her to him and stooping, kissed her cheek.
"You're right," he said. "Always right. I'll not worry him with it. My
word of honor. When the time comes he'll tell me, and until it comes,
I'll wait. And I love you both. Don't ever forget that."
He kissed her again and let her go.
But long after David had put down his prayer-book that night, and
after the nurse had rustled down the stairs to the night supper on the
dining-room table, Lucy lay awake and listened to Dick's slow pacing of
his bedroom floor.
He was very gentle with David from that time on, and tried to return
to his old light-hearted ways. On the day David was to have his first
broiled sweetbread he caught the nurse outside, borrowed her cap and
apron and carried in the tray himself.
"I hope your food is to your taste, Doctor David," he said, in a high
falsetto which set the nurse giggling in the hall. "I may not be much of
a nurse, but I can cook."
Even Lucy was deceived at times. He went his customary round, sent out
the monthly bills, opened and answered David's mail, bore the double
burden of David's work and his own ungrudgingly, but off guard he was
grave and abstracted. He began to look very thin, too, and Lucy often
heard him pacing the floor at night. She thought that he seldom or never
went to the Wheelers'.
And so passed the tenth day of David's illness, with the smile on
Elizabeth's face growing a trifle fixed as three days went by without
the shabby car rattling to the door; with "The Valley" playing its
second and final week before going into New York; and with Leslie Ward
unconsciously taking up the shuttle Clare had dropped, and carrying the
pattern one degree further toward completion.