He had been saved one thing, however; he had never seen her with Wallie Sayre. Then, one day in the country while he trudged afoot to make one of his rare professional visits, they went past together in Wallie's bright roadster. The sheer shock of it sent him against a fence, staring after them with an anger that shook him.
Late in November Elizabeth went away for a visit, and it gave him a breathing spell. But the strain was telling on him, and Bassett, stopping on his way to dinner at the Wheelers', told him so bluntly.
“You look pretty rotten,” he said. “It's no time to go to pieces now, when you've put up your fight and won it.”
“I'm all right. I haven't been sleeping. That's all.”
“How about the business? People coming to their senses?”
“Not very fast,” Dick admitted. “Of course it's a little soon.”
After dinner at the Wheelers', when Walter Wheeler had gone to a vestry meeting, Bassett delivered himself to Margaret of a highly indignant harangue on the situation in general.
“That's how I see it,” he finished. “He's done a fine thing. A finer thing by a damned sight than I'd do, or any of this town. He's given up money enough to pay the national debt—or nearly. If he'd come back with it, as Judson Clark, they wouldn't have cared a hang for the past. They'd have licked his boots. It makes me sick.”
He turned on her.
“You too, I think, Mrs. Wheeler. I'm not attacking you on that score; it's human nature. But it's the truth.”