The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David's appearance and Lucy's
grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed
and unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own innocence was
subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old
life.

Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds
at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and
resentment at his presence there. The laboratory window was dark, and
he stood outside and looked at it. He would have given his hope of
immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his
tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope. Even the memory of
certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him,
and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and
bitterness.

He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in
his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world
and take it. He could hardly tear himself away.

Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock, and
he had a half hour to spare before train-time. Following an impulse he
did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house. Just so months ago
had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he
went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the
way. Yet that it somehow drew him he knew. Not with the yearning he had
felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past
happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.