'I could see every year how the house was getting more on his nerves. Sometimes when he was feeling it more than usual he would say little things that I understood. For him it was like living with some one who didn't want him round. But he might have liked it.'
'You don't understand,' said Rachel, as if pricked into coming to her own defense. 'John didn't like the way the house came to us in the first place. You didn't know—'
'Yes, I did,' he responded as she hesitated, 'I found out.'
'And yet,' she went on, 'we used the house and the money—'
'You haven't known much about the business for several years, have you? Of course you do know that the house has been in your name from the beginning, almost. But you don't know that the few thousands Richard Hughes left have been invested for you ever since two years after he died. It crippled John for a while after he took it out of the business. But he always took good care of that money—it amounts to quite a little now.'
'John didn't like it because Richard—' Rachel hesitated again.
'You thought he was jealous. He did that after one day when you weeded out a lot of his books and put them away in some corner. And it was after he had those New York electric men here that evening and you seemed not to want to have them in the library, that he bought that corner of ground over there and made his garden. Don't you understand?'
Rachel dropped her face upon her hands, partly for relief from David's serious face, which forebore to rebuke her and yet of necessity did so, partly to close herself in with her own bewilderment. To reconstruct John's life meant to take a new view of her own also.
David leaned suddenly toward her. 'If John had been jealous, wouldn't he have had reason, Rachel? I know you weren't—untrue to him. But still—' He felt the formulation of the thought with her.
'I haven't judged you harshly, Rachel,' he went on in a moment, 'but it is not right that a man's brother should know him better than his wife does. I had to make you know, even at the last.'