Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ Doctor Reynolds, running up the stairs, found her there dead, and closed the door into David's room.
But David knew before they told him. He waited until they had placed her on her bed, had closed her eyes and drawn a white coverlet over her, and then he went in alone, and sat down beside her, and put a hand over her chilling one.
“If you are still here, Lucy,” he said, “and have not yet gone on, I want you to carry this with you. We are all right, here. Everybody is all right. You are not to worry.” ”

“ The faded carpet on the stairs, the old self-rocker Lucy had loved, the creaking faucets in the bathroom, Mike and Minnie, the laboratory,—united in their shabby strength, they were home to him. They had come back, never to be lost again. Home.
Then, little by little, they carried their claim further. They were not only home. They were the setting of a dream, long forgotten but now vivid in his mind, and a refuge from the dreary present. That dream had seen Elizabeth enshrined among the old familiar things; the old house was to be a sanctuary for her and for him. ”

“ David went carefully down the stairs and into his office, and there, at his long deserted desk, commenced a letter to Dick.
He was sitting there when Dick came up the street.......
The thought that he was going home had upheld Dick through the days that followed Bassett's departure for the West. He knew that it would be a fight, that not easily does a man step out of life and into it again, but after his days of inaction he stood ready to fight. For David, for Lucy, and, if it was not too late, for Elizabeth. ”