On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still another.
“What fol-de-rol is all this?” David demanded fiercely, with a childish look of expectation in his eyes. “Give me that box. Some more slippers, probably!”
He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It was a cigar!
It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.
“Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs,” she said. “I told her you wanted to see her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too.”
She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry her—”
“Well, why shouldn't he?” he demanded truculently. “A good woman would be one more anchor to windward.”
She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first. But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so busy as he had been.
She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.