that bothered him. After that--

He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her
at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its
counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her
on the verge of tears.

"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.

"Yes. But life does do things like that to people."

"Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You
and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because
we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."

"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"

"A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on
the carpet."

"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"

He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite
emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.

After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through
the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on
the stand.

XIII

The week that followed was an anxious one. David's physical condition
slowly improved. The slight thickness was gone from his speech, and he
sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought at regular
intervals. Over the entire house there hung all day the odor of stewing
chicken or of beef tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white
card which said: "Don't ring. Walk in."

As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson's
confession in the newspaper. Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least.
Appearing, as it did, the morning after David's stroke, it came in with
the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again, to start
a fire or line a pantry shelf. Harrison Miller, next door, read it over
his coffee. Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train glanced at it and
glanced away. Nina Ward read it in bed. And that was all.

There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers
of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also.
A table in David's room held a steadily growing number of bedroom
slippers, and Mrs. Morgan had been seen buying soles for still others.
David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these votive
offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled silence that
worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby. Something had happened, she was
sure. Something connected with Dick.