"Aunt Lucy!" he called.

"Yes, Dick?"

"The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time
to press my blue trousers this morning?"

There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the
dining-room, of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself
appeared below him.

"Just throw them down, Doctor Dick," she said. "I've got an iron
hot now."

"Some day, Minnie," he announced, "you will wear a halo and with
the angels sing."

This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning. He went
from house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small
song in his heart, and about eleven o'clock he found time to stop
at the village haberdasher's and to select a new tie, which he had
wrapped and stuffed in his pocket. And which, inspected in broad day
later on a country road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.

At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up
to him, albeit rather heavily. But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet.
She had a sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands
reaching out from the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly
Carlysle, Dick in love and possibly going back to Norada. Unlike