Page:Anne's house of dreams (1920 Canada).djvu/291

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
LESLIE RETURNS
281

him when his memory first came back. He clung to me in those first hard days when he was trying to realise that Dick’s death was not the thing of yesterday that it seemed to him. It was all very hard for him. I helped him all I could. When his sister came it was easier for him, because it seemed to him only the other day that he had seen her last. Fortunately she had not changed much, and that helped him, too.”

“It is all so strange and wonderful, Leslie. I think we none of us realise it yet.”

“I cannot. When I went into the house over there an hour ago, I felt that it must be a dream—that Dick must be there, with his childish smile, as he had been for so long. Anne, I seem stunned yet. I’m not glad or sorry—or anything. I feel as if something had been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn’t be I—as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn’t get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It’s good to see you again—it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul. Oh, Anne, I dread it all—the gossip and wonderment and questioning. When I think of that, I wish that I need not have come home at all. Dr. Dave was at the station when I came off the train—he brought me home. Poor old man, he feels very badly because he told me years ago that nothing could be done for Dick. ‘I honestly thought so, Leslie,’ he said to me today. ‘But I should have told you not to depend