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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Breaking Point, by Rinehart*
+#6 in our series by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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+The Breaking Point
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+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+January, 1999  [Etext #1601]
+[Date last updated: June 9, 2006]
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+
+
+The Breaking Point
+
+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Heaven and earth," sang the tenor, Mr. Henry Wallace, owner of the
+Wallace garage.  His larynx, which gave him somewhat the effect of
+having swallowed a crab-apple and got it only part way down,
+protruded above his low collar.
+
+"Heaven and earth," sang the bass, Mr. Edwin Goodno, of the meat
+market and the Boy Scouts.  "Heaven and earth, are full--"  His
+chin, large and fleshy, buried itself deep; his eyes were glued on
+the music sheet in his hand.
+
+"Are full, are full, are full," sang the soprano, Clare Rossiter,
+of the yellow colonial house on the Ridgely Road.  She sang with
+her eyes turned up, and as she reached G flat she lifted herself
+on her toes.  "Of the majesty, of Thy glory."
+
+"Ready," barked the choir master.  "Full now, and all together."
+
+The choir room in the parish house resounded to the twenty voices
+of the choir.  The choir master at the piano kept time with his
+head.  Earnest and intent, they filled the building with the
+Festival Te Deum of Dudley Buck, Opus 63, No.1.
+
+Elizabeth Wheeler liked choir practice.  She liked the way in
+which, after the different parts had been run through, the voices
+finally blended into harmony and beauty.  She liked the small
+sense of achievement it gave her, and of being a part, on Sundays,
+of the service.  She liked the feeling, when she put on the black
+cassock and white surplice and the small round velvet cap of
+having placed in her locker the things of this world, such as a
+rose-colored hat and a blue georgette frock, and of being stripped,
+as it were, for aspirations.
+
+At such times she had vague dreams of renunciation.  She saw
+herself cloistered in some quiet spot, withdrawn from the world; a
+place where there were long vistas of pillars and Gothic arches,
+after a photograph in the living room at home, and a great organ
+somewhere, playing.
+
+She would go home from church, however, clad in the rose-colored
+hat and the blue georgette frock, and eat a healthy Sunday luncheon;
+and by two o'clock in the afternoon, when the family slept and Jim
+had gone to the country club, her dreams were quite likely to be
+entirely different.  Generally speaking, they had to do with love.
+Romantic, unclouded young love dramatic only because it was love,
+and very happy.
+
+Sometime, perhaps, some one would come and say he loved her.  That
+was all.  That was at once the beginning and the end.  Her dreams
+led up to that and stopped.  Not by so much as a hand clasp did
+they pass that wall.
+
+So she sat in the choir room and awaited her turn.
+
+"Altos a little stronger, please."
+
+"Of the majesty, of the majesty, of the majesty, of Thy gl-o-o-ry,"
+sang Elizabeth.  And was at once a nun and a principal in a
+sentimental dream of two.
+
+What appeared to the eye was a small and rather ethereal figure
+with sleek brown hair and wistful eyes; nice eyes, of no particular
+color.  Pretty with the beauty of youth, sensitive and thoughtful,
+infinitely loyal and capable of suffering and not otherwise
+extraordinary was Elizabeth Wheeler in her plain wooden chair.  A
+figure suggestive of no drama and certainly of no tragedy, its
+attitude expectant and waiting, with that alternate hope and fear
+which is youth at twenty, when all of life lies ahead and every
+to-morrow may hold some great adventure.
+
+Clare Rossiter walked home that night with Elizabeth.  She was a
+tall blonde girl, lithe and graceful, and with a calculated coquetry
+in her clothes.
+
+"Do you mind going around the block?" she asked.  "By Station
+Street?" There was something furtive and yet candid in her voice,
+and Elizabeth glanced at her.
+
+"All right.  But it's out of your way, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes.  I--You're so funny, Elizabeth.  It's hard to talk to you.
+But I've got to talk to somebody.  I go around by Station Street
+every chance I get."
+
+"By Station Street?  Why?"
+
+"I should think you could guess why."
+
+She saw that Clare desired to be questioned, and at the same time
+she felt a great distaste for the threatened confidence.  She
+loathed arm-in-arm confidences, the indecency of dragging up and
+exposing, in whispers, things that should have been buried deep
+in reticence.  She hesitated, and Clare slipped an arm through hers.
+
+"You don't know, then, do you?  Sometimes I think every one must
+know.  And I don't care.  I've reached that point."
+
+Her confession, naive and shameless, and yet somehow not without a
+certain dignity, flowed on.  She was mad about Doctor Dick
+Livingstone.  Goodness knew why, for he never looked at her.  She
+might be the dirt under his feet for all he knew.  She trembled
+when she met him in the street, and sometimes he looked past her
+and never saw her.  She didn't sleep well any more.
+
+Elizabeth listened in great discomfort.  She did not see in Clare's
+hopeless passion the joy of the flagellant, or the self-dramatization
+of a neurotic girl.  She saw herself unwillingly forced to peer into
+the sentimental windows of Clare's soul, and there to see Doctor
+Dick Livingstone, an unconscious occupant.  But she had a certain
+fugitive sense of guilt, also.  Formless as her dreams had been,
+vague and shy, they had nevertheless centered about some one who
+should be tall, like Dick Livingstone, and alternately grave, which
+was his professional manner, and gay, which was his manner when it
+turned out to be only a cold, and he could take a few minutes to be
+himself.  Generally speaking, they centered about some one who
+resembled Dick Livingstone, but who did not, as did Doctor
+Livingstone, assume at times an air of frightful maturity and
+pretend that in years gone by he had dandled her on his knee.
+
+"Sometimes I think he positively avoids me," Clare wailed.  "There's
+the house, Elizabeth.  Do you mind stopping a moment?  He must be
+in his office now.  The light's burning."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't, Clare.  He'd hate it if he knew."
+
+She moved on and Clare slowly followed her.  The Rossiter girl's
+flow of talk had suddenly stopped.  She was thoughtful and
+impulsively suspicious.
+
+"Look here, Elizabeth, I believe you care for him yourself."
+
+"I?  What is the matter with you to-night, Clare?"
+
+"I'm just thinking.  Your voice was so queer."
+
+They walked on in silence.  The flow of Clare's confidences had
+ceased, and her eyes were calculating and a trifle hard.
+
+"There's a good bit of talk about him," she jerked out finally.
+"I suppose you've heard it."
+
+"What sort of talk?"
+
+"Oh, gossip.  You'll hear it.  Everybody's talking about it.  It's
+doing him a lot of harm."
+
+"I don't believe it," Elizabeth flared.  "This town hasn't anything
+else to do, and so it talks.  It makes me sick."
+
+She did not attempt to analyze the twisted motives that made Clare
+belittle what she professed to love.  And she did not ask what the
+gossip was.  Half way up Palmer Lane she turned in at the cement
+path between borders of early perennials which led to the white
+Wheeler house.  She was flushed and angry, hating Clare for her
+unsolicited confidence and her malice, hating even Haverly, that
+smiling, tree-shaded suburb which "talked."
+
+She opened the door quietly and went in.  Micky, the Irish terrier,
+lay asleep at the foot of the stairs, and her father's voice,
+reading aloud, came pleasantly from the living room.  Suddenly her
+sense of resentment died.  With the closing of the front door the
+peace of the house enveloped her.  What did it matter if, beyond
+that door, there were unrequited love and petty gossip, and even
+tragedy?  Not that she put all that into conscious thought; she had
+merely a sensation of sanctuary and peace.  Here, within these four
+walls, were all that one should need, love and security and quiet
+happiness.  Walter Wheeler, pausing to turn a page, heard her singing
+as she went up the stairs.  In the moment of the turning he too had
+a flash of content.  Twenty-five years of married life and all well;
+Nina married, Jim out of college, Elizabeth singing her way up the
+stairs, and here by the lamp his wife quietly knitting while he read
+to her.  He was reading Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own place,
+and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
+
+He did a certain amount of serious reading every year.
+
+On Sunday mornings, during the service, Elizabeth earnestly tried
+to banish all worldly thoughts.  In spite of this resolve, however,
+she was always conscious of a certain regret that the choir seats
+necessitated turning her profile to the congregation.  At the age
+of twelve she had decided that her nose was too short, and nothing
+had happened since to change her conviction.  She seldom so much
+as glanced at the congregation.  During her slow progress up and
+down the main aisle behind the Courtney boy, who was still a
+soprano and who carried the great gold cross, she always looked
+straight ahead.  Or rather, although she was unconscious of this,
+slightly up.  She always looked up when she sang, for she had
+commenced to take singing lessons when the piano music rack was
+high above her head.
+
+So she still lifted her eyes as she went up the aisle, and was
+extremely serious over the whole thing.  Because it is a solemn
+matter to take a number of people who have been up to that moment
+engrossed in thoughts of food or golf or servants or business, and
+in the twinkling of an eye, as the prayer book said about death,
+turn their minds to worship.
+
+Nevertheless, although she never looked at the pews, she was always
+conscious of two of them.  The one near the pulpit was the Sayres'
+and it was the social calendar of the town.  When Mrs. Sayre was in
+it, it was the social season.  One never knew when Mrs. Sayre's
+butler would call up and say:
+
+"I am speaking for Mrs. Sayre.  Mrs. Sayre would like to have the
+pleasure of Miss Wheeler's company on Thursday to luncheon, at
+one-thirty."
+
+When the Sayre pew was empty, the town knew, if it happened to be
+winter, that the Florida or Santa Barbara season was on; or in
+summer the Maine coast.
+
+The other pew was at the back of the church.  Always it had one
+occupant; sometimes it had three.  But the behavior of this pew
+was very erratic.  Sometimes an elderly and portly gentleman with
+white hair and fierce eyebrows would come in when the sermon was
+almost over.  Again, a hand would reach through the grill behind
+it, and a tall young man who had had his eyes fixed in the proper
+direction, but not always on the rector, would reach for his hat,
+get up and slip out.  On these occasions, however, he would first
+identify the owner of the hand and then bend over the one permanent
+occupant of the pew, a little old lady.  His speech was as Yea, yea,
+or Nay, nay, for he either said, "I'll be back for dinner," or "Don't
+look for me until you see me."
+
+And Mrs. Crosby, without taking her eyes from the sermon, would
+nod.
+
+Of late years, Doctor David Livingstone had been taking less and
+less of the "Don't-look-for-me-until-you-see-me" cases, and Doctor
+Dick had acquired a car, which would not freeze when left outside
+all night like a forgotten dog, and a sense of philosophy about
+sleep.  That is, that eleven o'clock P.M.  was bed-time to some
+people, but was just eleven o'clock for him.
+
+When he went to church he listened to the sermon, but rather often
+he looked at Elizabeth Wheeler.  When his eyes wandered, as the most
+faithful eyes will now and then, they were apt to rest on the flag
+that had hung, ever since the war, beside the altar.  He had fought
+for his country in a sea of mud, never nearer than two hundred miles
+to the battle line, fought with a surgical kit instead of a gun, but
+he was content.  Not to all the high adventure.
+
+Had he been asked, suddenly, the name of the tall blonde girl who
+sang among the sopranos, he could not have told it.
+
+The Sunday morning following Clare Rossiter's sentimental confession,
+Elizabeth tried very hard to banish all worldly thoughts, as usual,
+and to see the kneeling, rising and sitting congregation as there
+for worship.  But for the first time she wondered.  Some of the faces
+were blank, as though behind the steady gaze the mind had wandered
+far afield, or slept.  Some were intent, some even devout.  But for
+the first time she began to feel that people in the mass might be
+cruel, too.  How many of them, for instance, would sometime during
+the day pass on, behind their hands, the gossip Clare had mentioned?
+
+She changed her position, and glanced quickly over the church.  The
+Livingstone pew was fully occupied, and well up toward the front,
+Wallie Sayre was steadfastly regarding her.  She looked away quickly.
+
+Came the end of the service.  Came down the aisle the Courtney boy,
+clean and shining and carrying high his glowing symbol.  Came the
+choir, two by two, the women first, sopranos, altos and Elizabeth.
+Came the men, bass and tenor, neatly shaved for Sunday morning.
+Came the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe, a trifle wistful, because always
+he fell so far below the mark he had set.  Came the benediction.
+Came the slow rising from its knees of the congregation and its
+cheerful bustle of dispersal.
+
+Doctor Dick Livingstone stood up and helped Doctor David into his
+new spring overcoat.  He was very content.  It was May, and the sun
+was shining.  It was Sunday, and he would have an hour or two of
+leisure.  And he had made a resolution about a matter that had been
+in his mind for some time.  He was very content.
+
+He looked around the church with what was almost a possessive eye.
+These people were his friends.  He knew them all, and they knew him.
+They had, against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set
+in the wall on the roll of honor.  Small as it was, this was his
+world.
+
+Half smiling, he glanced about.  He did not realize that behind
+their bows and greetings there was something new that day, something
+not so much unkind as questioning.
+
+Outside in the street he tucked his aunt, Mrs. Crosby, against the
+spring wind, and waited at the wheel of the car while David entered
+with the deliberation of a man accustomed to the sagging of his old
+side-bar buggy under his weight.  Long ago Dick had dropped the
+titular "uncle," and as David he now addressed him.
+
+"You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David," he said
+firmly.  "Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs."
+
+David chuckled.  He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient
+vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors
+for forty years.  "I can trust old Nettie," he would say.  "She
+doesn't freeze her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and
+if I drop asleep she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is
+more than any automobile would do."
+
+"I'm going to sleep," he said comfortably.  "Get Wallie Sayre--I
+see he's back from some place again--or ask a nice girl.  Ask
+Elizabeth Wheeler.  I don't think Lucy here expects to be the only
+woman in your life."
+
+Dick stared into the windshield.
+
+"I've been wondering about that, David," he said, "just how much
+right--"
+
+"Balderdash!" David snorted.  "Don't get any fool notion in your
+head."
+
+Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and
+thinking.  Finally he drew a long breath.
+
+"All right," he said, "how about that golf--you need exercise.
+You're putting on weight, and you know it.  And you smoke too much.
+It's either less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it."
+
+David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:
+
+"Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?"
+
+"You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall.  If you get three of
+them back you're lucky." Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart.
+Long ago she had learned that her brother's belongings were his
+only by right of purchase, and were by way of being community
+property.  When, early in her widowhood and her return to his home,
+she had found that her protests resulted only in a sort of
+clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise from him.
+"I ask only one thing, David," she had said.  "Tell me where the
+things go.  There wasn't a blanket for the guest-room bed at the
+time of the Diocesan Convention."
+
+"I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them," Dick observed, in
+a carefully casual voice.  "I'll see the Carter baby, too, David,
+and that clears the afternoon.  Any message?"
+
+Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.
+
+"Give Elizabeth a kiss for me," he called over his shoulder, and
+went chuckling up the path.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved
+off.  She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism.  Her
+married years had taken her away from the environment which had
+enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only
+medical man in a growing community, he had learned to form his own
+sturdy decisions and then to abide by them.
+
+Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper
+course--he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world.  But
+to Lucy Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man's
+land of doubt and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and
+sometimes David frightened her.  He was so sure.
+
+She passed the open door into the waiting-room, where sat two or
+three patient and silent figures, and went back to the kitchen.
+Minnie, the elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor
+of roasting chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the
+freezer containing the dinner ice-cream.  An orderly Sunday peace
+was in the air, a gesture of homely comfort, order and security.
+
+Minnie got up.
+
+"I'll unpin your veil for you," she offered, obligingly.  "You've
+got time to lie down about ten minutes.  Mrs. Morgan said she's got
+to have her ears treated."
+
+"I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour."
+
+"She'll talk, all right," Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins.
+"She'd be talking to me yet if I'd stood there.  She's got her nerve,
+too, that woman."
+
+"I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the
+house, Minnie."
+
+"Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family
+either," said Minnie, truculently.  "She wanted to know who was
+Doctor Dick's mother.  Said she had had a woman here from Wyoming,
+and she thought she'd known his people."
+
+Mrs. Crosby stood very still.
+
+"I think she should bring her questions to the family," she said,
+after a silence.  "Thank you, Minnie."
+
+Bonnet in hand, she moved toward the stairs, climbed them and went
+into her room.  Recently life had been growing increasingly calm
+and less beset with doubts.  For the first time, with Dick's coming
+to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had
+found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it.  Recently she had
+been very happy.  The war was over and he was safely back; again
+she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his
+bed at night.  He filled the old house with cheer and with vitality.
+And, as David gave up more and more of the work, he took it on his
+broad shoulders, efficient, tireless, and increasingly popular.
+
+She put her bonnet away in its box, and suddenly there rose in her
+frail old body a fierce and unexpected resentment against David.
+He had chosen a course and abided by it.  He had even now no doubt
+or falterings.  Just as in the first anxious days there had been
+no doubt in him as to the essential rightness of what he was doing.
+And now--This was what came of taking a life and moulding it in
+accordance with a predetermined plan.  That was for God to do, not
+man.
+
+She sat down near her window and rocked slowly, to calm herself.
+Outside the Sunday movement of the little suburban town went by:
+the older Wheeler girl, Nina, who had recently married Leslie Ward,
+in her smart little car; Harrison Miller, the cynical bachelor who
+lived next door, on his way to the station news stand for the New
+York papers; young couples taking small babies for the air in a
+perambulator; younger couples, their eyes on each other and on the
+future.
+
+That, too, she reflected bitterly!  Dick was in love.  She had not
+watched him for that very thing for so long without being fairly
+sure now.  She had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart
+could never have caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned
+the Wheelers.  She had watched him for the past few months in
+church on Sunday mornings, and she knew that as she watched him,
+so he looked at Elizabeth.
+
+And David was so sure! So sure.
+
+The office door closed and Mrs. Morgan went out, a knitted scarf
+wrapping her ears against the wind, and following her exit came the
+slow ascent of David as he climbed the stairs to wash for dinner.
+
+She stopped rocking.
+
+"David!" she called sharply.
+
+He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly
+aromatic of drugs, cheerful and serene.
+
+"D'you call me?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes.  Shut the door and come in.  I want to talk to you."  He
+closed the door and went to the hearth-rug.  There was a photograph
+of Dick on the mantel, taken in his uniform, and he looked at it
+for a moment.  Then he turned.  "All right, my dear.  Let's have it."
+
+"Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?"  He stared at her.
+
+"She usually has," he said.  "I never knew you considered it worth
+repeating.  No.  Nothing in particular."
+
+The very fact that Mrs. Morgan had limited her inquiry to Minnie
+confirmed her suspicions.  But somehow, face to face with David,
+she could not see his contentment turned to anxiety.
+
+"I want to talk to you about Dick."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think he's in love, David."
+
+David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.
+
+"We had to expect that, Lucy.  Is it Elizabeth Wheeler, do you
+think?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+For a moment there was silence.  The canary in its cage hopped
+about, a beady inquisitive eye now on one, now on the other of them.
+
+"She's a good girl, Lucy."
+
+"That's not the point, is it?"
+
+"Do you think she cares for him?"
+
+"I don't know.  There's some talk of Wallie Sayre.  He's there a
+good bit."
+
+"Wallie Sayre!" snorted David.  "He's never done a day's work in
+his life and never will."  He reflected on that with growing
+indignation.  "He doesn't hold a candle to Dick.  Of course, if
+the girl's a fool--"
+
+Hands thrust deep into his pockets David took a turn about the room.
+Lucy watched him.  At last:
+
+"You're evading the real issue, David, aren't you?"
+
+"Perhaps I am," he admitted.  "I'd better talk to him.  I think he's
+got an idea he shouldn't marry.  That's nonsense."
+
+"I don't mean that, exactly," Lucy persisted.  "I mean, won't he
+want a good many things cleared up before he marries?  Isn't he
+likely to want to go back to Norada?"
+
+Some of the ruddy color left David's face.  He stood still, staring
+at her and silent.
+
+"You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and--"
+
+Her voice trailed off.  She could not even now easily recall those
+days when Dick was drilling on the golf links, and that later
+period of separation.
+
+"If he does go back--"
+
+"Donaldson is dead," David broke in, almost roughly.
+
+"Maggie Donaldson is still living."
+
+"What if she is?  She's loyal to the core, in the first place.  In
+the second, she's criminally liable.  As liable as I am."
+
+"There is one thing, David, I ought to know.  What has become of
+the Carlysle girl?"
+
+"She left the stage.  There was a sort of general conviction she
+was implicated and--I don't know, Lucy.  Sometimes I think she was."
+He sighed.  "I read something about her coming back, some months ago,
+in 'The Valley.' That was the thing she was playing the spring
+before it happened."  He turned on her.  "Don't get that in your
+head with the rest."
+
+"I wonder, sometimes."
+
+"I know it."
+
+Outside the slamming of an automobile door announced Dick's return,
+and almost immediately Minnie rang the old fashioned gong which
+hung in the lower hall.  Mrs. Crosby got up and placed a leaf of
+lettuce between the bars of the bird cage.
+
+"Dinner time, Caruso," she said absently.  Caruso was the name Dick
+had given the bird.  And to David: "She must be in her thirties now."
+
+"Probably."  Then his anger and anxiety burst out.  "What difference
+can it make about her?  About Donaldson's wife?  About any hang-over
+from that rotten time?  They're gone, all of them.  He's here.  He's
+safe and happy.  He's strong and fine.  That's gone."
+
+In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.
+
+"Smell's like chicken, Minnie," he said, into the dining room.
+
+"Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick."
+
+"Hi, up there!" he called lustily.  "Come and feed a starving man.
+I'm going to muffle the door-bell!"
+
+He stood smiling up at them, very tidy in his Sunday suit, very
+boyish, for all his thirty-two years.  His face, smilingly tender
+as he watched them, was strong rather than handsome, quietly
+dependable and faintly humorous.
+
+"In the language of our great ally," he said, "Madame et Monsieur,
+le diner est servi."
+
+In his eyes there was not only tenderness but a somewhat emphasized
+affection, as though he meant to demonstrate, not only to them but
+to himself, that this new thing that had come to him did not touch
+their old relationship.  For the new thing had come.  He was still
+slightly dazed with the knowledge of it, and considerably anxious.
+Because he had just taken a glance at himself in the mirror of the
+walnut hat-rack, and had seen nothing there particularly to inspire
+--well, to inspire what he wanted to inspire.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he drew Lucy's arm through his, and held
+her hand.  She seemed very small and frail beside him.
+
+"Some day," he said, "a strong wind will come along and carry off
+Mrs. Lucy Crosby, and the Doctors Livingstone will be obliged
+hurriedly to rent aeroplanes, and to search for her at various
+elevations!"
+
+David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.
+
+"Get the clubs?" he inquired.
+
+Dick looked almost stricken.
+
+"I forgot them, David," he said guiltily.  "Jim Wheeler went out
+to look them up, and I--I'll go back after dinner."
+
+It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate
+and said:
+
+"I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David.  I've asked
+Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater."
+
+"What about the baby at the Homer place?"
+
+"Not due until Sunday.  I'll leave my seat number at the box office,
+anyhow."
+
+"What are you going to see, Dick?" Mrs. Crosby asked.  "Will you
+have some dumplings?"
+
+
+"I will, but David shouldn't.  Too much starch.  Why, it's  'The
+Valley,' I think.  An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is
+starring in it."
+
+He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house
+on Palmer Lane, and a girl.  Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at
+him, and then glanced at David.
+
+But David did not look up from his plate.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace.  Walter Wheeler
+and his wife were like the house.  Just as here and there among the
+furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton
+sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain
+mediocrity their own outstanding virtues.  They liked music, believed
+in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue
+ambition, and had devoted their lives to their children.
+
+For many years their lives had centered about the children.  For
+years they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about
+small early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis.  They stood
+united to protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.
+
+Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes
+lonely and still apprehensive.  They feared motor car accidents,
+and Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen
+years.  They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy
+marriages, and hid their fears from each other.  Their nightly
+prayers were "to keep them safe and happy."
+
+But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one.  They
+saw them still as children, but as children determined to bear their
+own burdens.  Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his
+manhood in question if interrogated.  Nina was married and out of
+the home, but there loomed before them the possibility of maternity
+and its dangers for her.  There remained only Elizabeth, and on her
+they lavished the care formerly divided among the three.
+
+It was their intention and determination that she should never know
+trouble.  She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle.
+They saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile
+and very precious.
+
+Nina was different.  They had always worried a little about Nina,
+although they had never put their anxiety to each other.  Nina had
+always overrun her dress allowance, although she had never failed
+to be sweetly penitent about it, and Nina had always placed an undue
+emphasis on things.  Her bedroom before her marriage was cluttered
+with odds and ends, cotillion favors and photographs, college
+pennants and small unwise purchases--trophies of the gayety and
+conquest which were her life.
+
+And Nina had "come out."  It had cost a great deal, and it was not
+so much to introduce her to society as to put a family recognition
+on a fact already accomplished, for Nina had brought herself out
+unofficially at sixteen.  There had been the club ballroom, and a
+great many flowers which withered before they could be got to the
+hospital; and new clothing for all the family, and a caterer and
+orchestra.  After that, for a cold and tumultuous winter Mrs. Wheeler
+had sat up with the dowagers night after night until all hours, and
+the next morning had let Nina sleep, while she went about her
+household duties.  She had aged, rather, and her determined smile
+had grown a little fixed.
+
+She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more
+than anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed
+feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement.  Nina did it
+with characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.
+
+"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said.  "I want to
+tell you all something.  I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."
+
+There had been a momentary pause.  Then her father said:
+
+"Just a minute.  Is that Will Ward's boy?"
+
+"Yes.  He's not a boy."
+
+"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement.
+Has that occurred to either of you?"
+
+"Oh, he'll be around.  He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore
+is having his bachelor dinner.  I hope he doesn't look shot to
+pieces to-morrow.  These bachelor things--!  We'd better have a
+dinner or something, mother, and announce it."
+
+There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the
+occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton
+sideboard.  And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive
+that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's
+eyebrows and stayed there.
+
+For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her
+marriage.  She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance,
+coming around to his office a couple of months before the winter
+holidays and needing something badly.
+
+"It's like this, daddy," she would say.  "You're going to give me a
+check for Christmas anyhow, aren't you?  And it would do me more
+good now.  I simply can't go to another ball."
+
+"Where's your trousseau?"
+
+"It's worn out-danced to rags.  And out of date, too."
+
+"I don't understand it, Nina.  You and Leslie have a good income.
+Your mother and I--"
+
+"You didn't have any social demands.  And wedding presents! If one
+more friend of mine is married--"
+
+He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and
+thoughtfully.  And tearing it off would say:
+
+"Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas.  Don't feel aggrieved
+when the time comes and you have no gift from us."
+
+But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold
+out almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina
+something she simply couldn't do without.
+
+It wasn't quite fair, he felt.  It wasn't fair to Jim or to
+Elizabeth.  Particularly to Elizabeth.
+
+Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart,
+never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might
+keep her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and
+wholesomeness of her might keep her from unhappiness.  Sometimes,
+as she sat reading or sewing, with the light behind her shining
+through her soft hair, he saw in her a purity that was almost
+radiant.
+
+He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited
+Elizabeth to go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:
+
+"The house was gayer when Nina was at home."
+
+"Yes.  And you were pretty sick of it.  Full of roistering young
+idiots.  Piano and phonograph going at once, pairs of gigglers in
+the pantry at the refrigerator, pairs on the stairs and on the
+verandah, cigar-ashes--my cigars--and cigarettes over everything,
+and more infernal spooning going on than I've ever seen in my life."
+
+He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once.
+
+"What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?"
+
+"I think he's in love with her, Walter."
+
+"Love?  Any of the Sayre tribe?  Jim Sayre drank himself to death,
+and this boy is like him.  And Jim Sayre wasn't faithful to his wife.
+This boy is--well, he's an heir.  That's why he was begotten."
+
+Margaret Wheeler stared at him.
+
+"Why, Walter!" she said.  "He's a nice boy, and he's a gentleman."
+
+"Why?  Because he gets up when you come into the room?  Why in
+heaven's name don't you encourage real men to come here?  There's
+Dick Livingstone.  He's a man."
+
+Margaret hesitated.
+
+"Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about Dick
+Livingstone's coming here?"
+
+"Darned good for the town that he did come."
+
+"But--nobody ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew.  Then
+he turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that."
+
+"I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess,"
+he said grimly.
+
+"Well, there's something odd.  I don't believe Henry Livingstone,
+the Wyoming brother, ever had a son."
+
+"What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?"
+
+"Mrs. Cook Morgan's sister-in-law has been visiting her lately.
+She says she knew Henry Livingstone well years ago in the West, and
+she never heard he was married.  She says positively he was not
+married."
+
+"And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news," he said with
+angry sarcasm.  "Well, suppose that's true?  Suppose Dick is an
+illegitimate child?  That's the worst that's implied, I daresay.
+That's nothing against Dick himself.  I'll tell the world there's
+good blood on the Livingstone side, anyhow."
+
+"You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter."
+
+"That's different," he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence
+behind his newspaper.  Drat these women anyhow.  It was like some
+fool female to come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal.
+He'd stand up for Dick, if it ever came to a show-down.  He liked
+Dick.  What the devil did his mother matter, anyhow?  If this town
+hadn't had enough evidence of Dick Livingstone's quality the last
+few years he'd better go elsewhere.  He--
+
+He got up and whistled for the dog.
+
+"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out.  He
+always took a walk when things disturbed him.
+
+On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in
+her room upstairs.  On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have
+called a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark
+blue.  Seen thus, in the room which was her own expression, there
+was a certain nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about
+her eyes that was almost disconcerting.
+
+"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some
+man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she
+was shipwrecked.  No man in the world could do that to me."
+
+But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck.  Nothing
+seemed more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon,
+or all the afternoons.  Life went on, the comfortable life of an
+upper middle-class household.  Candles and flowers on the table and
+a neat waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping
+expeditions; fine hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days;
+small tributes of books and candy; invitations and consultations as
+to what to wear; choir practice, a class in the Sunday school, a
+little work among the poor; the volcano which had been Nina
+overflowing elsewhere in a smart little house with a butler out on
+the Ridgely Road.
+
+She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady--and
+serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small
+unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without
+knowing that she was waiting.
+
+Sometimes she worried.  She thought she ought to "do something."  A
+good many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were
+vague as to what.  She felt at those times that she was not being
+very useful, and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her
+father a couple of years before, when she was just eighteen.
+
+"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.
+
+"That's it," she had said despondently.  "I don't know.  I haven't
+any particular talent, you know.  But I don't think I ought to go on
+having you support me in idleness all my life."
+
+"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed,
+dryly.  "But here's the point, and I think it's important.  I don't
+intend to work without some compensation, and my family is my
+compensation.  You just hang around and make me happy, as you do,
+and you're fulfilling your economic place in the nation.  Don't you
+forget it, either."
+
+That had comforted her.  She had determined then never to marry but
+to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life.  She was
+quite earnest about it, and resolved.
+
+She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held
+it up before her.  It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the
+theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at
+night.  She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever
+since Dick Livingstone had gone.  It seemed, better somehow,
+frightfully important.  It was frightfully important.  For the first
+time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as
+she put it, for a long time.  She had an odd sense, too, of being
+young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some
+height: such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having
+to decide about life and death, and so on.
+
+She hoped he did not think she was only a child.
+
+She heard Nina coming up the stairs.  At the click of her high heels
+on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to
+the window.  Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a
+walk.  She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.
+
+Nina came in and closed the door.  She was smaller than Elizabeth
+and very pretty.  Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and
+from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was
+exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing
+she gave her young body.  Exquisitely pretty, too.
+
+She sat down on Elizabeth's bed with a sigh.
+
+"I really don't know what to do with father," she said.  "He flies
+off at a tangent over the smallest things.  Elizabeth dear, can you
+lend me twenty dollars?  I'll get my allowance on Tuesday."
+
+"I can give you ten."
+
+"Well, ask mother for the rest, won't you?  You needn't say it's
+for me.  I'll give it to you Tuesday."
+
+"I'm not going to mother, Nina.  She has had a lot of expenses this
+month."
+
+"Then I'll borrow it from Wallie Sayre," Nina said, accepting her
+defeat cheerfully.  "If it was an ordinary bill it could wait, but
+I lost it at bridge last night and it's got to be paid."
+
+"You oughtn't to play bridge for money," Elizabeth said, a bit
+primly.  "And if Leslie knew you borrowed from Wallace Sayre--"
+
+"I forgot! Wallie's downstairs, Elizabeth.  Really, if he wasn't
+so funny, he'd be tragic."
+
+"Why tragic?  He has everything in the world."
+
+"If you use a little bit of sense, you can have it too."
+
+"I don't want
+
+"Pooh!  That's what you think now.  Wallie's a nice person.  Lots
+of girls are mad about him.  And he has about all the money there
+is."  Getting no response from Elizabeth, she went on: "I was
+thinking it over last night.  You'll have to marry sometime, and
+it isn't as though Wallie was dissipated, or anything like that.
+I suppose he knows his way about, but then they all do."
+
+She got up.
+
+"Be nice to him, anyhow," she said.  "He's crazy about you, and
+when I think of you in that house!  It's a wonderful house,
+Elizabeth.  She's got a suite waiting for Wallie to be married
+before she furnishes it."
+
+Elizabeth looked around her virginal little room, with its painted
+dressing table, its chintz, and its white bed with the blue dress
+on it.
+
+"I'm very well satisfied as I am," she said.
+
+While she smoothed her hair before the mirror Nina surveyed the
+room and her eyes lighted on the frock.
+
+"Are you still wearing that shabby old thing?" she demanded.  "I do
+wish you'd get some proper clothes.  Are you going somewhere?"
+
+"I'm going to the theater on Wednesday night."
+
+"Who with?" Nina in her family was highly colloquial.
+
+"With Doctor Livingstone."
+
+"Are you joking?" Nina demanded.
+
+"Joking?  Of course not."
+
+Nina sat down again on the bed, her eyes on her sister, curious and
+not a little apprehensive.
+
+"It's the first time it's ever happened, to my knowledge," she
+declared.  "I know he's avoided me like poison.  I thought he hated
+women.  You know Clare Rossiter is--"
+
+Elizabeth turned suddenly.
+
+"Clare is ridiculous," she said.  "She hasn't any reserve, or dignity,
+or anything else.  And I don't see what my going to the theater with
+Dick Livingstone has to do with her anyhow."
+
+Nina raised her carefully plucked eyebrows.
+
+"Really!" she said.  "You needn't jump down my throat, you know."
+She considered, her eyes on her sister.  "Don't go and throw yourself
+away on Dick Livingstone, Sis.  You're too good-looking, and he
+hasn't a cent.  A suburban practice, out all night, that tumble-down
+old house and two old people hung around your necks, for Doctor David
+is letting go pretty fast.  It just won't do.  Besides, there's a
+story going the rounds about him, that--"
+
+"I don't want to hear it, if you don't mind."
+
+She went to the door and opened it.
+
+"I've hardly spoken a dozen words to him in my life.  But just
+remember this.  When I do find the man I want to marry, I shall make
+up my own mind.  As you did," she added as a parting shot.
+
+She was rather sorry as she went down the stairs.  She had begun to
+suspect what the family had never guessed, that Nina was not very
+happy.  More and more she saw in Nina's passion for clothes and
+gaiety, for small possessions, an attempt to substitute them for
+real things.  She even suspected that sometimes Nina was a little
+lonely.
+
+Wallie Sayre rose from a deep chair as she entered the living-room.
+
+"Hello," he said, "I was on the point of asking Central to give me
+this number so I could get you on the upstairs telephone."
+
+"Nina and I were talking.  I'm sorry."
+
+Wallie, in spite of Walter Wheeler's opinion of him, was an engaging
+youth with a wide smile, an air of careless well-being, and an
+obstinate jaw.  What he wanted he went after and generally secured,
+and Elizabeth, enlightened by Nina, began to have a small anxious
+feeling that afternoon that what he wanted just now happened to be
+herself.
+
+"Nina coming down?" he asked.
+
+"I suppose so.  Why?"
+
+"You couldn't pass the word along that you are going to be engaged
+for the next half hour?"
+
+"I might, but I certainly don't intend to."
+
+"You are as hard to isolate as a--as a germ," he complained.  "I
+gave up a perfectly good golf game to see you, and as your father
+generally calls the dog the moment I appear and goes for a walk, I
+thought I might see you alone."
+
+"You're seeing me alone now, you know."
+
+Suddenly he leaned over and catching up her hand, kissed it.
+
+"You're so cool and sweet," he said.  "I--I wish you liked me a
+little."  He smiled up at her, rather wistfully.  "I never knew any
+one quite like you."
+
+She drew her hand away.  Something Nina had said, that he knew his
+way about, came into her mind, and made her uncomfortable.  Back of
+him, suddenly, was that strange and mysterious region where men of
+his sort lived their furtive man-life, where they knew their way
+about.  She had no curiosity and no interest, but the mere fact of
+its existence as revealed by Nina repelled her.
+
+"There are plenty like me," she said.  "Don't be silly, Wallie.  I
+hate having my hand kissed."
+
+"I wonder," he observed shrewdly, "whether that's really true, or
+whether you just hate having me do it?"
+
+When Nina came in he was drawing a rough sketch of his new power
+boat, being built in Florida.
+
+Nina's delay was explained by the appearance, a few minutes later,
+of a rather sullen Annie with a tea tray.  Afternoon tea was not a
+Wheeler institution, but was notoriously a Sayre one.  And Nina
+believed in putting one's best foot foremost, even when that resulted
+in a state of unstable domestic equilibrium.
+
+"Put in a word for me, Nina," Wallie begged.  "I intend to ask
+Elizabeth to go to the theater this week, and I think she is going
+to refuse."
+
+"What's the play?" Nina inquired negligently.  She was privately
+determining that her mother needed a tea cart and a new tea service.
+There were some in old Georgian silver--
+
+"'The Valley.'  Not that the play matters.  It's Beverly Carlysle."
+
+"I thought she was dead, or something."
+
+"Or something is right.  She retired years ago, at the top of her
+success.  She was a howling beauty, I'm told.  I never saw her.
+There was some queer story.  I've forgotten it.  I was a kid then.
+How about it, Elizabeth?"
+
+"I'm sorry.  I'm going Wednesday night."
+
+He looked downcast over that, and he was curious, too.  But he made
+no comment save:
+
+"Well, better luck next time."
+
+"Just imagine," said Nina.  "She's going with Dick Livingstone.  Can
+you imagine it?"
+
+But Wallace Sayre could and did.  He had rather a stricken moment,
+too.  Of course, there might be nothing to it; but on the other hand,
+there very well might.  And Livingstone was the sort to attract the
+feminine woman; he had gravity and responsibility.  He was older too,
+and that flattered a girl.
+
+"He's not a bit attractive," Nina was saying.  "Quiet, and--well, I
+don't suppose he knows what he's got on."
+
+Wallie was watching Elizabeth.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he said, with masculine fairness.  "He's a good
+sort, and he's pretty much of a man."
+
+He was quite sure that the look Elizabeth gave him was grateful.
+
+He went soon after that, keeping up an appearance of gaiety to the
+end, and very careful to hope that Elizabeth would enjoy the play.
+
+"She's a wonder, they say," he said from the doorway.  "Take two
+hankies along, for it's got more tears than 'East Lynne' and 'The
+Old Homestead' put together."
+
+He went out, holding himself very erect and looking very cheerful
+until he reached the corner.  There however he slumped, and it was
+a rather despondent young man who stood sometime later, on the
+center of the deserted bridge over the small river, and surveyed
+the water with moody eyes.
+
+In the dusky living-room Nina was speaking her mind.
+
+"You treat him like a dog," she said.  "Oh, I know you're civil to
+him, but if any man looked at me the way Wallie looks at you--I
+don't know, though," she added, thoughtfully.  "It may be that that
+is why he is so keen.  It may be good tactics.  Most girls fall for
+him with a crash."
+
+But when she glanced at Elizabeth she saw that she had not heard.
+Her eyes were fixed on something on the street beyond the window.
+Nina looked out.  With a considerable rattle of loose joints and
+four extraordinarily worn tires the Livingstone car was going by.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+David did not sleep well that night.  He had not had his  golf after
+all, for the Homer baby had sent out his advance notice early in the
+afternoon, and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour
+when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to retire early for
+the Monday washing, and the Sayre butler was announcing dinner.
+Dick had come in at ten o'clock weary and triumphant, to announce
+that Richard Livingstone Homer, sex male, color white, weight nine
+pounds, had been safely delivered into this vale of tears.
+
+David lay in the great walnut bed which had been his mother's, and
+read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp.  He read the
+Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the
+thirty-nine articles, which usually had a  soporific effect on him.
+But it was no good.
+
+He got up and took to pacing his room, a portly, solid old figure
+in striped pajamas and the pair of knitted bedroom slippers which
+were always Mrs. Morgan's Christmas offering.  "To Doctor David,
+with love and a merry Xmas, from Angeline Morgan."
+
+At last he got his keys from his trousers pocket and padded softly
+down the stairs and into his office, where he drew the shade and
+turned on the lights.  Around him was the accumulated professional
+impedimenta of many years; the old-fashioned surgical chair; the
+corner closet which had been designed for china, and which held his
+instruments; the bookcase; his framed diplomas on the wall, their
+signatures faded, their seals a little dingy; his desk, from which
+Dick had removed the old ledger which had held those erratic records
+from which, when he needed money, he had been wont--and reluctant
+--to make out his bills.
+
+Through an open door was Dick's office, a neat place of shining
+linoleum and small glass stands, highly modern and business-like.
+Beyond the office and opening from it was his laboratory, which
+had been the fruit closet once, and into which Dick on occasion
+retired to fuss with slides and tubes and stains and a microscope.
+
+Sometimes he called David in, and talked at length and with
+enthusiasm about such human interest things as the Staphylococcus
+pyogenes aureus, and the Friedlander bacillus.  The older man would
+listen, but his eyes were oftener on Dick than on the microscope or
+the slide.
+
+David went to the bookcase and got down a large book, much worn,
+and carried it to his desk.
+
+An hour or so later he heard footsteps in the hall and closed the
+book hastily.  It was Lucy, a wadded dressing gown over her
+nightdress and a glass of hot milk in her hand.
+
+"You drink this and come to bed, David," she said peremptorily.
+"I've been lying upstairs waiting for you to come up, and I need
+some sleep."
+
+He had no sort of hope that she would not notice the book.
+
+"I just got to thinking things over, Lucy," he explained, his tone
+apologetic.  "There's no use pretending I'm not worried.  I am."
+
+"Well, it's in God's hands," she said, quite simply.  "Take this up
+and drink it slowly.  If you gulp it down it makes a lump in your
+stomach."
+
+She stood by while he replaced the book in the bookcase and put out
+the lights.  Then in the darkness she preceded him up the stairs.
+
+"You'd better take the milk yourself, Lucy," he said.  "You're not
+sleeping either."
+
+"I've had some.  Good-night."
+
+He went in and sitting on the side of his bed sipped at his milk.
+Lucy was right.  It was not in their hands.  He had the feeling all
+at once of having relinquished a great burden.  He crawled into bed
+and was almost instantly asleep.
+
+So sometime after midnight found David sleeping, and Lucy on her
+knees.  It found Elizabeth dreamlessly unconscious in her white bed,
+and Dick Livingstone asleep also, but in his clothing, and in a
+chair by the window.  In the light from a street lamp his face
+showed lines of fatigue and nervous stress, lines only revealed
+when during sleep a man casts off the mask with which he protects
+his soul against even friendly eyes.
+
+But midnight found others awake.  It found Nina, for instance, in
+her draped French bed, consulting her jeweled watch and listening
+for Leslie's return from the country club.  An angry and rather
+heart-sick Nina.  And it found the night editor of one of the
+morning papers drinking a cup of coffee that a boy had brought in,
+and running through a mass of copy on his desk.  He picked up
+several sheets of paper, with a photograph clamped to them, and
+ran through them quickly.  A man in a soft hat, sitting on the desk,
+watched him idly.
+
+"Beverly Carlysle," commented the night editor.  "Back with bells
+on!" He took up the photograph.  "Doesn't look much older, does she?
+It's a queer world."
+
+Louis Bassett, star reporter and feature writer of the Times-
+Republican, smiled reminiscently.
+
+"She was a wonder," he said.  "I interviewed her once, and I was
+crazy about her.  She had the stage set for me, all right.  The
+papers had been full of the incident of Jud Clark and the night he
+lined up fifteen Johnnies in the lobby, each with a bouquet as big
+as a tub, all of them in top hats and Inverness coats, and standing
+in a row.  So she played up the heavy domestic for me; knitting or
+sewing, I forget."
+
+"Fell for her, did you?"
+
+"Did I?  That was ten years ago, and I'm not sure I'm over it yet."
+
+"Probably that's the reason," said the city editor, drily.  "Go and
+see her, and get over it.  Get her views on the flapper and bobbed
+hair, for next Sunday.  Smith would be crazy about it."
+
+He finished his coffee.
+
+"You might ask, too, what she thinks has become of Judson Clark,"
+he added.  "I have an idea she knows, if any one does."  Bassett
+stared at him.
+
+"You're joking, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes.  But it would make a darned good story."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+When he finished medical college Dick Livingstone had  found, like
+other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel
+and did not meet.  Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy
+in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of
+the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles.  And win.
+He felt that he would win.
+
+Along the other lay David.
+
+It was not until he had completed his course and had come home that
+he had realized that David was growing old.  Even then he might have
+felt that, by the time David was compelled to relinquish his hold on
+his practice, he himself would be sufficiently established in his
+specialty to take over the support of the household.  But here there
+was interposed a new element, one he had not counted on.  David
+was fiercely jealous of his practice; the thought that it might
+pass into new and alien hands was bitter to him.  To hand it down
+to his adopted son was one thing; to pass it over to "some young
+whipper-snapper" was another.
+
+Nor were David's motives selfish or unworthy.  His patients were
+his friends.  He had a sense of responsibility to them, and very
+little faith in the new modern methods.  He thought there was a
+great deal of tomfoolery about them, and he viewed the gradual loss
+of faith in drugs with alarm.  When Dick wore rubber gloves during
+their first obstetric case together he snorted.
+
+"I've delivered about half the population of this town," he said,
+"and slapped 'em to make 'em breathe with my own bare hands.  And
+I'm still here and so are they."
+
+For by that time Dick had made his decision.  He could not abandon
+David.  For him then and hereafter the routine of a general practice
+in a suburban town, the long hours, the varied responsibilities, the
+feeling he had sometimes that by doing many things passably he was
+doing none of them well.  But for compensation he had old David's
+content and greater leisure, and Lucy Crosby's gratitude and love.
+
+Now and then he chafed a little when he read some article in a
+medical journal by one of his fellow enthusiasts, or when, in France,
+he saw men younger than himself obtaining an experience in their
+several specialties that would enable them to reach wide fields at
+home.  But mostly he was content, or at least resigned.  He was
+building up the Livingstone practice, and his one anxiety was lest
+the time should come when more patients asked for Doctor Dick than
+for Doctor David.  He did not want David hurt.
+
+After ten years the strangeness of his situation had ceased to be
+strange.  Always he meant some time to go back to Norada, and there
+to clear up certain things, but it was a long journey, and he had
+very little time.  And, as the years went on, the past seemed
+unimportant compared with the present.  He gave little thought to
+the future.
+
+Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.
+
+Just when he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Wheeler he did not
+know.  He had gone away to the war, leaving her a little girl,
+apparently, and he had come back to find her, a woman.  He did not
+even know he was in love, at first.  It was when, one day, he found
+himself driving past the Wheeler house without occasion that he
+began to grow uneasy.
+
+The future at once became extraordinarily important and so also,
+but somewhat less vitally, the past.  Had he the right to marry, if
+he could make her care for him?
+
+He sat in his chair by the window the night after the Homer baby's
+arrival, and faced his situation.  Marriage meant many things.  It
+meant love and companionship, but it also meant, should mean,
+children.  Had he the right to go ahead and live his life fully and
+happily?  Was there any chance that, out of the years behind him,
+there would come some forgotten thing, some taint or incident, to
+spoil the carefully woven fabric of his life?
+
+Not his life.  Hers.
+
+On the Monday night after he had asked Elizabeth to go to the theater
+he went into David's office and closed the door.  Lucy, alive to
+every movement in the old house, heard him go in and, rocking in her
+chair overhead, her hands idle in her lap, waited in tense anxiety
+for the interview to end.  She thought she knew what Dick would ask,
+and what David would answer.  And, in a way, David would be right.
+Dick, fine, lovable, upstanding Dick, had a right to the things other
+men had, to love and a home of his own, to children, to his own full
+life.
+
+But suppose Dick insisted on clearing everything up before he
+married?  For to Lucy it was unthinkable that any girl in her senses
+would refuse him.  Suppose he went back to Norada?  He had not
+changed greatly in ten years.  He had been well known there, a
+conspicuous figure.
+
+Her mind began to turn on the possibility of keeping him away from
+Norada.
+
+Some time later she heard the office door open and then close with
+Dick's characteristic slam.  He came up the stairs, two at a time
+as was his custom, and knocked at her door.  When he came in she
+saw what David's answer had been, and she closed her eyes for an
+instant.
+
+"Put on your things," he said gayly, "and we'll take a ride on the
+hill-tops.  I've arranged for a moon."
+
+And when she hesitated:
+
+"It makes you sleep, you know.  I'm going, if I have to ride alone
+and talk to an imaginary lady beside me."
+
+She rather imagined that that had been his first idea,
+modified by his thought of her.  She went over and put a wrinkled
+hand on his arm.
+
+"You look happy, Dick," she said wistfully.
+
+"I am happy, Aunt Lucy," he replied, and bending over, kissed her.
+
+On Wednesday he was in a state of alternating high spirits and
+periods of silence.  Even Minnie noticed it.
+
+"Mr. Dick's that queer I hardly know how to take him." she said to
+Lucy.  "He came back and asked for noodle soup, and he put about all
+the hardware in the kitchen on him and said he was a knight in armor.
+And when I took the soup in he didn't eat it."
+
+It was when he was ready to go out that Lucy's fears were realized.
+He came in, as always when anything unusual was afoot, to let her
+look him over.  He knew that she waited for him, to give his tie a
+final pat, to inspect the laundering of his shirt bosom, to pick
+imaginary threads off his dinner coat.
+
+"Well?" he said, standing before her, "how's this?  Art can do no
+more, Mrs. Crosby."
+
+"I'll brush your back," she said, and brought the brush.  He stooped
+to her, according to the little ceremony she had established, and she
+made little dabs at his speckless back.  "There, that's better."
+
+He straightened.
+
+"How do you think Uncle David is?" he asked, unexpectedly.
+
+"Better than he has been in years.  Why?"
+
+"Because I'm thinking of taking a little trip.  Only ten days," he
+added, seeing her face.  "You could house-clean my office while I'm
+away.  You know you've been wanting to."
+
+She dropped the brush, and he stooped to pick it up.  That gave her
+a moment.
+
+"'Where?" she managed.
+
+"To Dry River, by way of Norada."
+
+"Why should you go back there?" she asked, in a carefully suppressed
+voice.  "Why don't you go East?  You've wanted to go back to Johns
+Hopkins for months?"
+
+"On the other hand, why shouldn't I go back to Norada?" he asked,
+with an affectation of lightness.  Then he put his hand on her
+shoulders.  "Why shouldn't I go back and clear things up in my own
+mind?  Why shouldn't I find out, for instance, that I am a free man?"
+
+"You are free."
+
+"I've got to know," he said, almost doggedly.  "I can't take a
+chance.  I believe I am.  I believe David, of course.  But anyhow
+I'd like to see the ranch.  I want to see Maggie Donaldson."
+
+"She's not at the ranch.  Her husband died, you know."
+
+"I have an idea I can find her," he said.  "I'll make a good try,
+anyhow."
+
+When he had gone she got her salts bottle and lay down on her bed.
+Her heart was hammering wildly.
+
+Elizabeth was waiting for him in the living-room, in the midst of
+her family.  She looked absurdly young and very pretty, and he had
+a momentary misgiving that he was old to her, and that--Heaven save
+the mark!--that she looked up to him.  He considered the blue dress
+the height of fashion and the mold of form, and having taken off
+his overcoat in the hall, tried to put on Mr. Wheeler's instead in
+his excitement.  Also, becoming very dignified after the overcoat
+incident, and making an exit which should conceal his wild
+exultation and show only polite pleasure, he stumbled over Micky,
+so that they finally departed to a series of staccato yelps.
+
+He felt very hot and slightly ridiculous as he tucked Elizabeth into
+the little car, being very particular about her feet, and starting
+with extreme care, so as not to jar her.  He had the feeling of
+being entrusted temporarily with something infinitely precious, and
+very, very dear.  Something that must never suffer or be hurt.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+On Wednesday morning David was in an office in the city.  He sat
+forward on the edge of his chair, and from time to time he took out
+his handkerchief and wiped his face or polished his glasses, quite
+unconscious of either action.  He was in his best suit, with the tie
+Lucy had given him for Christmas.
+
+Across from him, barricaded behind a great mahogany desk, sat a
+small man with keen eyes and a neat brown beard.  On the desk were
+a spotless blotter, an inkstand of silver and a pen.  Nothing else.
+The terrible order of the place had at first rather oppressed David.
+
+The small man was answering a question.
+
+"Rather on the contrary, I should say.  The stronger the character
+the greater the smash."
+
+David pondered this.
+
+"I've read all you've written on the subject," he said finally.
+"Especially since the war."
+
+The psycho-analyst put his finger tips together, judicially.  "Yes.
+The war bore me out," he observed with a certain complacence.  "It
+added a great deal to our literature, too, although some of the
+positions are not well taken.  Van Alston, for instance--"
+
+"You have said, I think, that every man has a breaking point."
+
+"Absolutely.  All of us.  We can go just so far.  Where the mind is
+strong and very sound we can go further than when it is not.  Some
+men, for instance, lead lives that would break you or me.  Was there
+--was there such a history in this case?"
+
+"Yes." Doctor David's voice was reluctant.
+
+"The mind is a strange thing," went on the little man, musingly.
+"It has its censors, that go off duty during sleep.  Our sternest
+and often unconscious repressions pass them then, and emerge in the
+form of dreams.  But of course you know all that.  Dream symbolism.
+Does the person in this case dream?  That would be interesting,
+perhaps important."
+
+"I don't know," David said unhappily.
+
+"The walling off, you say, followed a shock?"
+
+"Shock and serious illness."
+
+"Was there fear with the shock?"
+
+David hesitated.  "Yes," he said finally.  "Very great fear, I
+believe."
+
+Doctor Lauler glanced quickly at David and then looked away.
+
+"I see," he nodded.  "Of course the walling off of a part of the
+past--you said a part--?"
+
+"Practically all of it.  I'll tell you about that later.  What
+about the walling off?"
+
+"It is generally the result of what we call the protective mechanism
+of fear.  Back of most of these cases lies fear.  Not cowardice, but
+perhaps we might say the limit of endurance.  Fear is a complex, of
+course.  Dislike, in a small way, has the same reaction.  We are apt
+to forget the names of persons we dislike.  But if you have been
+reading on the subject--"
+
+"I've been studying it for ten years."
+
+"Ten years! Do you mean that this condition has persisted for ten
+years?"
+
+David moistened his dry lips.  "Yes," he admitted.  "It might not
+have done so, but the--the person who made this experiment used
+suggestion.  The patient was very ill, and weak.  It was desirable
+that he should not identify himself with his past.  The loss of
+memory of the period immediately preceding was complete, but of
+course, gradually, the cloud began to lift over the earlier periods.
+It was there that suggestion was used, so that such memories as came
+back were,--well, the patient adapted them to fit what he was told."
+
+Again Doctor Lauler shot a swift glance at David, and looked away.
+
+"An interesting experiment," he commented.  "It must have taken
+courage."
+
+"A justifiable experiment," David affirmed stoutly.  "And it took
+courage.  Yes."
+
+David got up and reached for his hat.  Then he braced himself for the
+real purpose of his visit.
+
+"What I have been wondering about," he said, very carefully, "is this:
+this mechanism of fear, this wall--how strong is it?"
+
+"Strong?"
+
+"It's like a dam, I take it.  It holds back certain memories, like
+a floodgate.  Is anything likely to break it down?"
+
+"Possibly something intimately connected with the forgotten period
+might do it.  I don't know, Livingstone.  We've only commenced to
+dig into the mind, and we have many theories and a few established
+facts.  For instance, the primal instincts--"
+
+He talked on, with David nodding now and then in apparent
+understanding, but with his thoughts far away.  He knew the theories;
+a good many of them he considered poppycock.  Dreams might come from
+the subconscious mind, but a good many of them came from the stomach.
+They might be safety valves for the mind, but also they might be
+rarebit.  He didn't want dreams; what he wanted was facts.  Facts
+and hope.
+
+The office attendant came in.  She was as tidy as the desk, as
+obsessed by order, as wooden.  She placed a pad before the small
+man and withdrew.  He rose.
+
+"Let me know if I can be of any further assistance, Doctor," he said.
+"And I'll be glad to see your patient at any time.  I'd like the
+record for my files."
+
+"Thank you," David said.  He stood fingering his hat.
+
+"I suppose there's nothing to do?  The dam will either break, or it
+won't."
+
+"That's about it.  Of course since the conditions that produced the
+setting up of the defensive machinery were unhappy, I'd say that
+happiness will play a large part in the situation.  That happiness
+and a normal occupation will do a great deal to maintain the status
+quo.  Of course I would advise no return to the unhappy environment,
+and no shocks.  Nothing, in other words, to break down the wall."
+
+Outside, in the corridor, David remembered to put on his hat.
+Happiness and a normal occupation, yes.  But no shock.
+
+Nevertheless, he felt vaguely comforted, and as though it had helped
+to bring the situation out into the open and discuss it.  He had
+carried his burden alone for ten years, or with only the additional
+weight of Lucy's apprehensions.  He wandered out into the city
+streets, and found himself, some time later, at the railway station,
+without remembering how he got there.
+
+Across from the station was a large billboard, and on it the name
+of Beverly Carlysle and her play, "The Valley."  He stood for some
+time and looked at it, before he went in to buy his ticket.  Not
+until he was in the train did he realize that he had forgotten to
+get his lunch.
+
+He attended to his work that evening as usual, but he felt very
+tired, and Lucy, going in at nine o'clock, found him dozing in his
+chair, his collar half choking him and his face deeply suffused.
+She wakened him and then, sitting down across from him, joined him
+in the vigil that was to last until they heard the car outside.
+
+She had brought in her sewing, and David pretended to read.  Now
+and then he looked at his watch.
+
+At midnight they heard the car go in, and the slamming of the
+stable door, followed by Dick's footsteps on the walk outside.
+Lucy was very pale, and the hands that held her sewing twitched
+nervously.  Suddenly she stood up and put a hand on David's shoulder.
+
+Dick was whistling on the kitchen porch.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Louis Bassett was standing at the back of the theater, talking to
+the publicity man of The Valley company, Fred Gregory.  Bassett was
+calm and only slightly interested.  By the end of the first act he
+had realized that the star was giving a fine performance, that she
+had even grown in power, and that his sentimental memory of her was
+considerably dearer than the reality.
+
+"Going like a house afire," he said, as the curtain fell.
+
+Beside his robust physique, Gregory, the publicity man, sank into
+insignificance.  Even his pale spats, at which Bassett had shot a
+contemptuous glance, his highly expensive tailoring, failed to make
+him appear more than he was, a little, dapper man, with a pale cold
+eye and a rather too frequent smile.  "She's the best there is," was
+his comment.  He hesitated, then added: "She's my sister, you know.
+Naturally, for business reasons, I don't publish the relationship."
+
+Bassett glanced at him.
+
+"That so?  Well, I'm glad she decided to come back.  She's too good
+to bury."
+
+But if he expected Gregory to follow the lead he was disappointed.
+His eyes, blank and expressionless, were wandering over the house
+as the lights flashed up.
+
+"This whole tour has been a triumph.  She's the best there is,"
+Gregory repeated, "and they know it."
+
+"Does she know it?" Bassett inquired.
+
+"She doesn't throw any temperament, if that's what you mean.  She--"
+
+He checked himself suddenly, and stood, clutching the railing, bent
+forward and staring into the audience.  Bassett watched him,
+considerably surprised.  It took a great deal to startle a theatrical
+publicity man, yet here was one who looked as though he had seen a
+ghost.
+
+After a time Gregory straightened and moistened his dry lips.
+
+"There's a man sitting down there--see here, the sixth row, next
+the aisle; there's a girl in a blue dress beside him.  See him?  Do
+you know who he is?"
+
+"Never saw him before."
+
+For perhaps two minutes Gregory continued to stare.  Then he moved
+over to the side of the house and braced against the wall continued
+his close and anxious inspection.  After a time he turned away and,
+passing behind the boxes, made his way into the wings.  Bassett's
+curiosity was aroused, especially when, shortly after, Gregory
+reappeared, bringing with him a small man in an untidy suit who was
+probably, Bassett surmised, the stage manager.
+
+He saw the small man stare, nod, stand watching, and finally
+disappear, and Gregory resume his former position and attitude
+against the side wall.  Throughout the last act Gregory did not
+once look at the stage.  He continued his steady, unwavering study
+of the man in the sixth row seat next the aisle, and Bassett
+continued his study of the little man.
+
+His long training made him quick to scent a story.  He was not sure,
+of course, but the situation appeared to him at least suggestive.
+With the end of the play he wandered out with the crowd, edging his
+way close to the man and girl who had focused Gregory's attention,
+and following them into the street.  He saw only a tall man with a
+certain quiet distinction of bearing, and a young and pretty girl,
+still flushed and excited, who went up the street a short distance
+and got into a small and shabby car.  Bassett noted, carefully, the
+license number of the car.
+
+Then, still curious and extremely interested, he walked briskly
+around to the stage entrance, nodded to the doorkeeper, and went in.
+
+Gregory was not in sight, but the stage manager was there, directing
+the striking of the last set.
+
+"I'm waiting for Gregory," Bassett said.  "Hasn't fainted, has he?"
+
+"What d'you mean, fainted?" inquired the stage manager, with a touch
+of hostility.
+
+"I was with him when he thought he recognized somebody.  You know
+who.  You can tell him I got his automobile number."
+
+The stage manager's hostility faded, and he fell into the trap.
+"You know about it, then?"
+
+"I was with him when he saw him.  Unfortunately I couldn't help him
+out."
+
+"It's just possible it's a chance resemblance.  I'm darned if I
+know.  Look at the facts!  He's supposed to be dead.  Ten years
+dead.  His money's been split up a dozen ways from the ace.  Then
+--I knew him, you know--I don't think even he would have the
+courage to come here and sit through a performance.  Although,"
+he added reflectively, "Jud Clark had the nerve for anything."
+
+Bassett gave him a cigar and went out into the alley way that led
+to the street.  Once there, he stood still and softly whistled.
+Jud Clark!  If that was Judson Clark, he had the story of a lifetime.
+
+For some time he walked the deserted streets of the city, thinking
+and puzzling over the possibility of Gregory's being right.
+Sometime after midnight he went back to the office and to the
+filing room.  There, for two hours, he sat reading closely old
+files of the paper, going through them methodically and making
+occasional brief notes in a memorandum.  Then, at two o'clock he
+put away the files, and sitting back, lighted a cigar.
+
+It was all there; the enormous Clark fortune inherited by a boy who
+had gone mad about this same Beverly Carlysle; her marriage to her
+leading man, Howard Lucas; the subsequent killing of Lucas by Clark
+at his Wyoming ranch, and Clark's escape into the mountains.  The
+sensational details of Clark's infatuation, the drama of a crime
+and Clark's subsequent escape, and the later certainty of his death
+in a mountain storm had filled the newspapers of the time for weeks.
+Judson Clark had been famous, notorious, infamous and dead, all in
+less than two years.  A shameful and somehow a pitiful story.
+
+But if Judson Clark had died, the story still lived.  Every so often
+it came up again.  Three years before he had been declared legally
+dead, and his vast estates, as provided by the will of old Elihu
+Clark, had gone to universities and hospitals.  But now and then
+came a rumor.  Jud Clark was living in India; he had a cattle ranch
+in Venezuela; he had been seen on the streets of New Orleans.
+
+Bassett ran over the situation in his mind.
+
+First then, grant that Clark was still living and had been in the
+theater that night.  It became necessary to grant other things.
+To grant, for instance, that Clark was capable of sitting, with a
+girl beside him, through a performance by the woman for whom he had
+wrecked his life, of a play he had once known from the opening line
+to the tag.  To grant that he could laugh and applaud, and at the
+drop of the curtain go calmly away, with such memories behind him
+as must be his.  To grant, too, that he had survived miraculously
+his sensational disappearance, found a new identity and a new place
+for himself; even, witness the girl, possible new ties.
+
+At half past two Bassett closed his memorandum book, stuffed it
+into his pocket, and started for home.  As he passed the Ardmore
+Hotel he looked up at its windows.  Gregory would have told her,
+probably.  He wondered, half amused, whether the stage manager had
+told him of his inquiries, and whether in that case they might not
+fear him more than Clark himself.  After all, they had nothing to
+fear from Clark, if this were Clark.
+
+No.  What they might see and dread, knowing he had had a hint of a
+possible situation, was the revival of the old story she had tried
+so hard to live down.  She was ambitious, and a new and rigid
+morality was sweeping the country.  What once might have been an
+asset stood now to be a bitter liability.
+
+He slowed down, absorbed in deep thought.  It was a queer story.
+It might be even more queer than it seemed.  Gregory had been
+frightened rather than startled.  The man had even gone pale.
+
+Motive, motive, that was the word.  What motive lay behind action.
+Conscious and unconscious, every volitional act was the result of
+motive.
+
+He wondered what she had done when Gregory had told her.
+
+As a matter of fact, Beverly Carlysle had shown less anxiety than
+her brother.  Still pale and shocked, he had gone directly to her
+dressing-room when the curtain was rung down, had tapped and gone
+in.  She was sitting wearily in a chair, a cigarette between her
+fingers.  Around was the usual litter of a stage dressing-room after
+the play, the long shelf beneath the mirror crowded with powders,
+rouge and pencils, a bunch of roses in the corner washstand basin,
+a wardrobe trunk, and a maid covering with cheese-cloth bags the
+evening's costumes.
+
+"It went all right, I think, Fred."
+
+"Yes," he said absently.  "Go on out, Alice.  I'll let you come back
+in a few minutes."
+
+He waited until the door closed.
+
+"What's the matter?" she asked rather indifferently.  "If it's more
+quarreling in the company I don't want to hear it.  I'm tired."
+Then she took a full look at him, and sat up.
+
+"Fred! What is it?"
+
+He gave her the truth, brutally and at once.
+
+"I think Judson Clark was in the house to-night."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"Neither would I, if somebody told me," he agreed sullenly.  "I saw
+him.  Don't you suppose I know him?  And if you don't believe me,
+call Saunders.  I got him out front.  He knows."
+
+"You called Saunders!"
+
+"Why not?  I tell you, Bev, I was nearly crazy.  I'm nearly crazy
+now."
+
+"What did Saunders say?"
+
+"If he didn't know Clark was dead, he'd say it was Clark."
+
+She was worried by that time, but far more collected than he was.
+She sat, absently tapping the shelf with a nail file, and reflecting.
+
+"All right," she said.  "Suppose he was?  What then?  He has been
+in hiding for ten years.  Why shouldn't he continue to hide?  What
+would bring him out now?  Unless he needed money.  Was he shabby?"
+
+"No," he said sulkily.  "He was with a girl.  He was dressed all
+right."
+
+"You didn't say anything, except to Saunders?"
+
+"No I'm not crazy."
+
+"I'd better see Joe," she reflected.  "Go and get him, Fred.  And
+tell Alice she needn't wait."
+
+She got up and moved about the room, putting things away and finding
+relief in movement, a still beautiful woman, with rather accentuated
+features and an easy carriage.  Without her make-up the stage
+illusion of her youth was gone, and she showed past suffering and
+present strain.  Just then she was uneasy and resentful, startled
+but not particularly alarmed.  Her reason told her that Judson Clark,
+even if he still lived and had been there that night, meant to leave
+the dead past to care for itself, and wished no more than she to
+revive it.  She was surprised to find, as she moved about, that she
+was trembling.
+
+Her brother came back, and she turned to meet him.  To her surprise
+he was standing inside the door, white to the lips and staring at
+her with wild eyes.
+
+"Saunders!" he said chokingly, "Saunders, the damned fool!  He's
+given it away."
+
+He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking
+lips.
+
+"He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican," he managed to say.
+"Do you--do you know what that means?  And Bassett got Clark's
+automobile number.  He said so."
+
+He looked up at her, his face twitching.  "They're hound dogs on a
+scent, Bev.  They'll get the story, and blow it wide open."
+
+"You know I'm prepared for that.  I have been for ten years."
+
+"I know."  He was suddenly emotional.  He reached out and took her
+hand.  "Poor old Bev!" he said.  "After the way you've come back,
+too.  It's a damned shame."
+
+She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better
+balanced always.  She let him stroke her hand, standing near him
+with her eyes absent and a little hard.
+
+"I'd better make sure that was Jud first," he offered, after a time,
+"and then warn him."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Bassett will be after him."
+
+"No!" she commanded sharply.  "No, Fred.  You let the thing alone.
+You've built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking
+straight.  Plenty of things might happen.  What probably has happened
+is that this Bassett is at home and in bed."
+
+She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the
+hotel.  But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not
+immediately go to bed.  She put on a dressing gown and stood for a
+long time by her window, looking out.  Instead of the city lights,
+however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at
+their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as
+a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life.  There
+he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track.
+There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their
+honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son.  And
+there, when she died, he had returned with the child, himself broken
+and prematurely aged, to be killed by one of his own stallions when
+the boy was fifteen.
+
+Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty,
+when she first met him.  Going the usual pace, too, and throwing
+money right and left.  He had financed her as a star, ransacking
+Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her.
+She shivered as she remembered it.  It had been desperate and
+terrible, because she had cared for some one else.
+
+Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over
+again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying
+Howard, she had married Judson Clark?  Would he have settled down?
+She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only
+playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him
+inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a
+sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other.  That he
+played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.
+
+She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed.
+She was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little.  After a time
+she remembered that she had not put any cream on her face.  She
+crawled out again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content
+that sent him singing into his shower.  In the old stable which
+now housed both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them
+both with indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe
+clutched in his teeth.  From below there came up the odors of
+frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.
+
+The world was a good place.  A fine old place.  It had work and
+play and love.  It had office hours and visits and the golf links,
+and it had soft feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always
+cared for and looked after.
+
+She liked him.  She did not think he was old.  She thought his
+profession was the finest in the world.  She had wondered if he
+would have time to come and see her, some day.  Time!  He considered
+very seriously, as he shaved before the slightly distorted mirror
+in the bathroom, whether it would be too soon to run in that
+afternoon, just to see if she was tired, or had caught cold or
+anything?  Perhaps to-morrow would look better.  No, hang it all,
+to-day was to-day.
+
+On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the
+staircase.
+
+"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
+David, who was content that one emergency had passed, she looked
+ahead and saw their common life a series of such chances, with
+their anxieties and their dangers.
+
+She could not eat.
+
+Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that
+afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble.  She sent him into
+the waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his
+late thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room,
+and to her weekly mending.
+
+On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less
+uncomfortable.  There was an air of peace and quiet respectability
+about the old house, a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and
+stability that somehow made his errand appear absurd.  To connect
+it with Judson Clark and his tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.
+
+His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.
+
+When, hat in hand, he walked into Dick's consulting room, he had
+made up his mind that he would pay the price of an overactive
+imagination for a prescription, walk out again, and try to forget
+that he had let a chance resemblance carry him off his feet.
+
+But, as he watched the man who sat across from him, tilted back in
+his swivel chair, he was not so sure.  Here was the same tall
+figure, the heavy brown hair, the features and boyish smile of the
+photograph he had seen the night before.  As Judson Clark might
+have looked at thirty-two this man looked.
+
+He made his explanation easily.  Was in town for the day.  Subject
+to these headaches.  Worse over the right eye.  No, he didn't wear
+glasses; perhaps he should.
+
+It wasn't Clark.  It couldn't be.  Jud Clark sitting there tilted
+back in an old chair and asking questions as to the nature of his
+fictitious pain!  Impossible.  Nevertheless he was of a mind to
+clear the slate and get some sleep that night, and having taken his
+prescription and paid for it, he sat back and commenced an
+apparently casual interrogation.
+
+"Two names on your sign, I see.  Father and son, I suppose?"
+
+"Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle."
+
+"I should think you'd be in the city.  Limitations to this sort of
+thing, aren't there?"
+
+"I like it," said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.
+
+"Patients are your friends, of course.  Born and raised here, I
+suppose?"
+
+"Not exactly.  I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming.  My father had
+a ranch out there."
+
+Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.
+
+"Wyoming!" the reporter commented.  "That's a long way from here.
+Anywhere near the new oil fields?"
+
+"Not far from Norada.  That's the oil center," Dick offered,
+good-naturedly.  He rose, and glanced again at the clock.  "If those
+headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined."
+
+Bassett was puzzled.  It seemed to him that there had been a shade
+of evasion in the other man's manner, slightly less frankness in
+his eyes.  But he showed no excitement, nothing furtive or alarmed.
+And the open and unsolicited statement as to Norada baffled him.
+He had to admit to himself either that a man strongly resembling
+Judson Clark had come from the same neighborhood, or--
+
+"Norada?" he said.  "That's where the big Clark ranch was located,
+wasn't it?  Ever happen to meet Judson Clark?"
+
+"Our place was very isolated."
+
+Bassett found himself being politely ushered out, considerably more
+at sea than when he went in and slightly irritated.  His annoyance
+was not decreased by the calm voice behind him which said:
+
+"Better drink considerable water when you take that stuff.  Some
+stomachs don't tolerate it very well."
+
+The door closed.  The reporter stood in the waiting-room for a
+moment.  Then he clapped on his hat.
+
+"Well, I'm a damned fool," he muttered, and went out into the street.
+
+He was disappointed and a trifle sheepish.  Life was full of queer
+chances, that was all.  No resemblance on earth, no coincidence of
+birthplace, could make him believe that Judson Clark, waster,
+profligate and fugitive from the law was now sitting up at night
+with sick children, or delivering babies.
+
+After a time he remembered the prescription in his hand, and was
+about to destroy it.  He stopped and examined it, and then carefully
+placed it in his pocket-book.  After all, there were things that
+looked queer.  The fellow had certainly evaded that last question
+of his.
+
+He made his way, head bent, toward the station.
+
+He had ten minutes to wait, and he wandered to the newsstand.  He
+made a casual inspection of its display, bought a newspaper and
+was turning away, when he stopped and gazed after a man who had
+just passed him from an out-bound train.
+
+The reporter looked after him with amused interest.  Gregory, too!
+The Livingstone chap had certainly started something.  But it was
+odd, too.  How had Gregory traced him?  Wasn't there something more
+in Gregory's presence there than met the eye?  Gregory's visit might
+be, like his own, the desire to satisfy himself that the man was or
+was not Clark.  Or it might be the result of a conviction that it
+was Clark, and a warning against himself.  But if he had traced him,
+didn't that indicate that Clark himself had got into communication
+with him?  In other words, that the chap was Clark, after all?
+Gregory, having made an inquiry of a hackman, had started along the
+street, and, after a moment's thought, Bassett fell into line behind
+him.  He was extremely interested and increasingly cheerful.  He
+remained well behind, and with his newspaper rolled in his hand
+assumed the easy yet brisk walk of the commuters around him, bound
+for home and their early suburban dinners.
+
+Half way along Station Street Gregory stopped before the Livingstone
+house, read the sign, and rang the doorbell.  The reporter slowed
+down, to give him time for admission, and then slowly passed.  In
+front of Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited.
+He lighted a cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place.
+Strange, if this were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken
+refuge, this old brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable
+in the rear, its small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple
+garden flowers set in a half acre or so of ground.
+
+A doctor.  A pill shooter.  Jud Clark!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+Elizabeth had gone about all day with a smile on her lips and a sort
+of exaltation in her eyes.  She had, girl fashion, gone over and
+over the totally uneventful evening they had spent together,
+remembering small speeches and gestures; what he had said and she
+had answered.
+
+She had, for instance, mentioned Clare Rossiter, very casually.  Oh
+very, very casually.  And he had said: "Clare Rossiter?  Oh, yes,
+the tall blonde girl, isn't she?"
+
+She was very happy.  He had not seemed to find her too young or
+particularly immature.  He had asked her opinion on quite important
+things, and listened carefully when she replied.  She felt, though,
+that she knew about one-tenth as much as he did, and she determined
+to read very seriously from that time on.  Her mother, missing
+her that afternoon, found her curled up in the library, beginning
+the first volume of Gibbon's "Rome" with an air of determined
+concentration, and wearing her best summer frock.
+
+She did not intend to depend purely on Gibbon's "Rome," evidently.
+
+"Are you expecting any one, Elizabeth?" she asked, with the frank
+directness characteristic of mothers, and Elizabeth, fixing a date
+in her mind with terrible firmness, looked up absently and said:
+
+"No one in particular."
+
+At three o'clock, with a slight headache from concentration, she
+went upstairs and put up her hair again; rather high this time to
+make her feel taller.  Of course, it was not likely he would come.
+He was very busy.  So many people depended on him.  It must be
+wonderful to be like that, to have people needing one, and looking
+out of the door and saying: "I think I see him coming now."
+
+Nevertheless when the postman rang her heart gave a small leap and
+then stood quite still.  When Annie slowly mounted the stairs she
+was already on her feet, but it was only a card announcing: "Mrs.
+Sayre, Wednesday, May fifteenth, luncheon at one-thirty."
+
+However, at half past four the bell rang again, and a masculine
+voice informed Annie, a moment later, that it would put its overcoat
+here, because lately a dog had eaten a piece out of it and got most
+awful indigestion.
+
+The time it took Annie to get up the stairs again gave her a moment
+so that she could breathe more naturally, and she went down very
+deliberately and so dreadfully poised that at first he thought she
+was not glad to see him.
+
+"I came, you see," he said.  "I intended to wait until to-morrow,
+but I had a little time.  But if you're doing anything--"
+
+"I was reading Gibbon's 'Rome,'" she informed him.  "I think every
+one should know it.  Don't you?"
+
+"Good heavens, what for?" he inquired.
+
+"I don't know." They looked at each other, and suddenly they laughed.
+
+"I wanted to improve my mind," she explained.  "I felt, last night,
+that you-that you know so many things, and that I was frightfully
+stupid."
+
+"Do you mean to say," he asked, aghast, "that I--! Great Scott!"
+
+Settled in the living-room, they got back rather quickly to their
+status of the night before, and he was moved to confession.
+
+"I didn't really intend to wait until to-morrow," he said.  "I got
+up with the full intention of coming here to-day, if I did it over
+the wreck of my practice.  At eleven o'clock this morning I held up
+a consultation ten minutes to go to Yardsleys and buy a tie, for
+this express purpose.  Perhaps you have noticed it already."
+
+"I have indeed.  It's a wonderful tie."
+
+"Neat but not gaudy, eh?" He grinned at her, happily.  "You know,
+you might steer me a bit about my ties.  I have the taste of an
+African savage.  I nearly bought a purple one, with red stripes.
+And Aunt Lucy thinks I should wear white lawn, like David!"
+
+They talked, those small, highly significant nothings which are
+only the barrier behind which go on the eager questionings and
+unspoken answers of youth and love.  They had known each other for
+years, had exchanged the same give and take of neighborhood talk
+when they met as now.  To-day nothing was changed, and everything.
+
+Then, out of a clear sky, he said:
+
+"I may be going away before long, Elizabeth."
+
+He was watching her intently.  She had a singular feeling that
+behind this, as behind everything that afternoon, was something not
+spoken.  Something that related to her.  Perhaps it was because of
+his tone.
+
+"You don't mean-not to stay?"
+
+"No.  I want to go back to Wyoming.  Where I was born.  Only for a
+few weeks."
+
+And in that "only for a few weeks" there lay some of the unspoken
+things.  That he would miss her and come back quickly to her.  That
+she would miss him, and that subconsciously he knew it.  And behind
+that, too, a promise.  He would come back to her.
+
+"Only for a few weeks," he repeated.  "I thought perhaps, if you
+wouldn't mind my writing to you, now and then--I write a rotten
+hand, you know.  Most medical men do."
+
+"I should like it very much," she said, primly.
+
+She felt suddenly very lonely, as though he had already gone, and
+slightly resentful, not at him but at the way things happened.  And
+then, too, everyone knew that once a Westerner always a Westerner.
+The West always called its children.  Not that she put it that way.
+But she had a sort of vision, gained from the moving pictures, of a
+country of wide spaces and tall mountains, where men wore quaint
+clothing and the women rode wild horses and had the dash she knew
+she lacked.  She was stirred by vague jealousy.
+
+"You may never come back," she said, casually.  "After all, you
+were born there, and we must seem very quiet to you."
+
+"Quiet!" he exclaimed.  "You are heavenly restful and comforting.
+You--" he checked himself and got up.  "Then I'm to write, and you
+are to make out as much of my scrawl as you can and answer.  Is
+that right?"
+
+"I'll write you all the town gossip."
+
+"If you do--!" he threatened her.  "You're to write me what you're
+doing, and all about yourself.  Remember, I'll be counting on you."
+
+And, if their voices were light, there was in both of them the sense
+of a pact made, of a bond that was to hold them, like clasped hands,
+against their coming separation.  It was rather anti-climacteric
+after that to have him acknowledge that he didn't know exactly when
+he could get away!
+
+She went with him to the door and stood there, her soft hair blowing,
+as he got into the car.  When he looked back, as he turned the corner,
+she was still there.  He felt very happy affable, and he picked up
+an elderly village woman with her and went considerably out of his
+way to take her home.
+
+He got back to the office at half past six to find a red-eyed
+Minnie in the hall.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+AT half past five that afternoon David had let himself into the
+house with his latch key, hung up his overcoat on the old walnut
+hat rack, and went into his office.  The strain of the days before
+had told on him, and he felt weary and not entirely well.  He had
+fallen asleep in his buggy, and had wakened to find old Nettie
+drawing him slowly down the main street of the town, pursuing an
+erratic but homeward course, while the people on the pavements
+watched and smiled.
+
+He went into his office, closed the door, and then, on the old
+leather couch with its sagging springs he stretched himself out to
+finish his nap.
+
+Almost immediately, however, the doorbell rang, and a moment later
+Minnie opened his door.
+
+"Gentleman to see you, Doctor David."
+
+He got up clumsily and settled his collar.  Then he opened the door
+into his waiting-room.
+
+"Come in," he said resignedly.
+
+A small, dapper man, in precisely the type of clothes David most
+abominated, and wearing light-colored spats, rose from his chair
+and looked at him with evident surprise.
+
+"I'm afraid I've made a mistake.  A Doctor Livingstone left his seat
+number for calls at the box office of the Annex Theater last night
+--the Happy Valley company--but he was a younger man.  I--"
+
+David stiffened, but he surveyed his visitor impassively from under
+his shaggy white eyebrows.
+
+"I haven't been in a theater for a dozen years, sir."
+
+Gregory was convinced that he had made a mistake.  Like Louis
+Bassett, the very unlikeliness of Jud Clark being connected with
+the domestic atmosphere and quiet respectability of the old house
+made him feel intrusive and absurd.  He was about to apologize and
+turn away, when he thought of something.
+
+"There are two names on your sign.  The other one, was he by any
+chance at the theater last night?"
+
+"I think I shall have to have a reason for these inquiries," David
+said slowly.
+
+He was trying to place Gregory, to fit him into the situation;
+straining back over ten years of security, racking his memory,
+without result.
+
+"Just what have you come to find out?" he asked, as Gregory turned
+and looked around the room.
+
+"The other Doctor Livingstone is your brother?"
+
+"My nephew."
+
+Gregory shot a sharp glance at him, but all he saw was an elderly
+man, with heavy white hair and fierce shaggy eyebrows, a portly and
+dignified elderly gentleman, rather resentfully courteous.
+
+"Sorry to trouble you," he said.  "I suppose I've made a mistake.
+I--is your nephew at home?"
+
+"No."
+
+"May I see a picture of him, if you have one?"
+
+David's wild impulse was to smash Gregory to the earth, to
+annihilate him.  His collar felt tight, and he pulled it away from
+his throat.
+
+"Not unless I know why you want to see it."
+
+"He is tall, rather spare?  And he took a young lady to the theater
+last night?" Gregory persisted.
+
+"He answers that description.  What of it?"
+
+"And he is your nephew?"
+
+"My brother's son," David said steadily.
+
+Somehow it began to dawn on him that there was nothing inimical in
+this strange visitor, that he was anxious and ill at ease.  There
+was, indeed, something almost beseeching in Gregory's eyes, as
+though he stood ready to give confidence for confidence.  And, more
+than that, a sort of not unfriendly stubbornness, as though he had
+come to do something he meant to do.
+
+"Sit down," he said, relaxing somewhat.  "Certainly my  nephew is
+making no secret of the fact that he went to the theater last night.
+If you'll tell me who you are--"
+
+But Gregory did not sit down.  He stood where he was, and continued
+to eye David intently.
+
+"I don't know just what it conveys to you, Doctor, but I am Beverly
+Carlysle's brother."
+
+David lowered himself into his chair.  His knees were suddenly weak
+under him.  But he was able to control his voice.
+
+"I see," he said.  And waited.
+
+"Something happened last night at the theater.  It may be important.
+I'd have to see your nephew, in order to find out if it is.  I can't
+afford to make a mistake."
+
+David's ruddy color had faded.  He opened a drawer of his desk and
+produced a copy of the photograph of Dick in his uniform.  "Maybe
+this will help you."
+
+Gregory studied it carefully, carrying it to the window to do so.
+When he confronted David again he was certain of himself and his
+errand for the first time, and his manner had changed.
+
+"Yes," he said, significantly.  "It does."
+
+He placed the photograph on the desk, and sitting down, drew his
+chair close to David's.  "I'll not use any names, Doctor.  I think
+you know what I'm talking about.  I was sure enough last night.
+I'm certain now."
+
+David nodded.  "Go on."
+
+"We'll start like this.  God knows I don't want to make any trouble.
+But I'll put a hypothetical case.  Suppose that a man when drunk
+commits a crime and then disappears; suppose he leaves behind him
+a bad record and an enormous fortune; suppose then he reforms and
+becomes a useful citizen, and everything is buried."
+
+Doctor David listened stonily.  Gregory lowered his voice.
+
+"Suppose there's a woman mixed up in that situation.  Not guiltily,
+but there's a lot of talk.  And suppose she lives it down, for ten
+years, and then goes back to her profession, in a play the families
+take the children to see, and makes good.  It isn't hard to suppose
+that neither of those two people wants the thing revived, is it?"
+
+David cleared his throat.
+
+"You mean, then, that there is danger of such a revival?" 
+
+"I think there is," Gregory said bitterly.  "I recognized this man
+last night, and called a fellow who knew him in the old days,
+Saunders, our stage manager.  And a newspaper man named Bassett
+wormed it out of Saunders.  You know what that means."
+
+David heard him clearly, but as though from a great distance.
+
+"You can see how it appears to Bassett.  If he's found it, it's the
+big story of a lifetime.  I thought he'd better be warned."
+
+When David said nothing, but sat holding tight to the arms of his
+old chair, Gregory reached for his hat and got up.
+
+"The thing for him to do," he said, "is to leave town for a while.
+This Bassett is a hound-hog on a scent.  They all are.  He is
+Bassett of the Times-Republican.  And he took Jud--he took your
+nephew's automobile license number."
+
+Still David sat silent, and Gregory moved to the door.
+
+"Get him away, to-night if you can."
+
+"Thank you," David said.  His voice was thick.  "I appreciate your
+coming."
+
+He got up dizzily, as Gregory said, "Good-evening" and went out.
+The room seemed very dark and unsteady, and not familiar.  So this
+was what had happened, after all the safe years!  A man could work
+and build and pray, but if his house was built on the sand--
+
+As the outer door closed David fell to the floor with a crash.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Bassett lounged outside the neat privet hedge which it was Harrison
+Miller's custom to clip with his own bachelor hands, and waited.
+And as he waited he tried to imagine what was going on inside,
+behind the neatly curtained windows of the old brick house.
+
+He was tempted to ring the bell again, pretend to have forgotten
+something, and perhaps happen in on what might be drama of a rather
+high order; what, supposing the man was Clark after all, was fairly
+sure to be drama.  He discarded the idea, however, and began again
+his interested survey of the premises.  Whoever conceived this sort
+of haven for Clark, if it were Clark, had shown considerable
+shrewdness.  The town fairly smelt of respectability; the tree-shaded
+streets, the children in socks and small crisp-laundered garments,
+the houses set back, each in its square of shaved lawn, all peaceful,
+middle class and unexciting.  The last town in the world for Judson
+Clark, the last profession, the last house, this shabby old brick
+before him.
+
+He smiled rather grimly as he reflected that if Gregory had been
+right in his identification, he was, beyond those windows at that
+moment, very possibly warning Clark against himself.  Gregory would
+know his type, that he never let go.  He drew himself up a little.
+
+The house door opened, and Gregory came out, turning toward the
+station.  Bassett caught up with him and put a hand on his arm.
+
+"Well?" he said cheerfully.  "It was, wasn't it?"
+
+Gregory stopped dead and stared at him.  Then:
+
+"Old dog Tray!" he said sneeringly.  "If your brain was as good
+as your nose, Bassett, you'd be a whale of a newspaper man."
+
+"Don't bother about my brain.  It's working fine to-day, anyhow.
+Well, what had he to say for himself?"
+
+Gregory's mind was busy, and he had had a moment to pull himself
+together.
+
+"We both get off together," he said, more amiably.  "That fellow
+isn't Jud Clark and never was.  He's a doctor, and the nephew of
+the old doctor there.  They're in practice together."
+
+"Did you see them both?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Bassett eyed him.  Either Gregory was a good actor, or the whole
+trail ended there after all.  He himself had felt, after his
+interview, with Dick, that the scent was false.  And there was
+this to be said: Gregory had been in the house scarcely ten
+minutes.  Long enough to acknowledge a mistake, but hardly long
+enough for any dramatic identification.  He was keenly disappointed,
+but he had had long experience of disappointment, and after a
+moment he only said:
+
+"Well, that's that.  He certainly looked like Clark to me."
+
+"I'll say he did."
+
+"Rather surprised him, didn't you?"
+
+"Oh, he was all right," Gregory said.  "I didn't tell him anything,
+of course."
+
+Bassett looked at his watch.
+
+"I was after you, all right," he said, cheerfully.  "But if I was
+barking up the wrong tree, I'm done.  I don't have to be hit on the
+head to make me stop.  Come and have a soda-water on me," he
+finished amiably.  "There's no train until seven."
+
+But Gregory refused.
+
+"No, thanks.  I'll wander on down to the station and get a paper."
+
+The reporter smiled.  Gregory was holding a grudge against him, for
+a bad night and a bad day.
+
+"All right," he said affably.  "I'll see you at the train.  I'll
+walk about a bit."
+
+He turned and started back up the street again, walking idly.  His
+chagrin was very real.  He hated to be fooled, and fooled he had
+been.  Gregory was not the only one who had lost a night's sleep.
+Then, unexpectedly, he was hailed from the curbstone, and he saw
+with amazement that it was Dick Livingstone.
+
+"Take you anywhere?" Dick asked.  "How's the headache?" 
+
+"Better, thanks." Bassett stared at him.  "No, I'm just walking
+around until train-time.  Are you starting out or going home,
+at this hour?"
+
+"Going home.  Well, glad the head's better."
+
+He drove on, leaving the reporter gazing after him.  So Gregory had
+been lying.  He hadn't seen this chap at all.  Then why--?  He
+walked on, turning this new phase of the situation over in his mind.
+Why this elaborate fiction, if Gregory had merely gone in, waited
+for ten minutes, and come out again?
+
+It wasn't reasonable.  It wasn't logical.  Something had happened
+inside the house to convince Gregory that he was right.  He had
+seen somebody, or something.  He hadn't needed to lie.  He could
+have said frankly that he had seen no one.  But no, he had built
+up a fabric carefully calculated to throw Bassett off the scent.
+
+He saw Dick stop in front of the house, get out and enter.  And
+coming to a decision, he followed him and rang the doorbell.  For a
+long time no one answered.  Then the maid of the afternoon opened
+the door, her eyes red with crying, and looked at him with hostility.
+
+"Doctor Richard Livingstone?"
+
+"You can't see him."
+
+"It's important."
+
+"Well, you can't see him.  Doctor David has just had a stroke.  He's
+in the office now, on the floor."
+
+She closed the door on him, and he turned and went away.  It was
+all clear to him; Gregory had seen, not Clark, but the older man;
+had told him and gone away.  And under the shock the older man had
+collapsed.  That was sad.  It was very sad.  But it was also
+extremely convincing.
+
+He sat up late that night again, running over the entries in his
+notebook.  The old story, as he pieced it out, ran like this:
+
+It had been twelve years ago, when, according to the old files,
+Clark had financed Beverly Carlysle's first starring venture.  He
+had, apparently, started out in the beginning only to give her the
+publicity she needed.  In devising it, however, he had shown a sort
+of boyish recklessness and ingenuity that had caught the interest
+of the press, and set newspaper men to chuckling wherever they got
+together.
+
+He had got together a dozen or so of young men like himself, wealthy,
+idle and reckless with youth, and, headed by him, they had made the
+exploitation of the young star an occupation.  The newspapers
+referred to the star and her constellation as Beverly Carlysle and
+her Broadway Beauties.  It had been unvicious, young, and highly
+entertaining, and it had cost Judson Clark his membership in his
+father's conservative old clubs.
+
+For a time it livened the theatrical world with escapades that were
+harmless enough, if sensational.  Then, after a time, newspaper row
+began to whisper that young Clark was in love with the girl.  The
+Broadway Beauties broke up, after a wild farewell dinner.  The
+audiences ceased to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed
+alike with gardenias in their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties
+with their evening suits, to rise in their boxes on the star's
+appearance and solemnly bow.  And the star herself lost a little
+of the anxious look she frequently wore.
+
+The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused,
+and was taking his refusal badly.  Reporters saw him, carelessly
+dressed, outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that
+the girl had thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man.
+One thing was clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to
+drinking hard, and after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably,
+she refused to see him any more.
+
+When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas, her
+leading man; his third wife.  Lucas had been not a bad chap, a
+good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker,
+carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable.  They had
+bought a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a
+new play with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces
+nervously, stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of
+his handsome, rather vacuous face.
+
+Judson Clark had taken his yacht and gone to Europe, and was
+reported from here and there not too favorably.  But when he came
+back, in early September, he had apparently recovered from his
+infatuation, was his old, carefully dressed self again, and when
+interviewed declared his intention of spending the winter on his
+Wyoming ranch.
+
+Of course he must have heard of Lucas's breakdown, and equally, of
+course, he must have seen them both.  What happened at that
+interview, by what casual attitude he allayed Lucas's probable
+jealousy and the girl's own nervousness, Bassett had no way of
+discovering.  It was clear that he convinced them both of his good
+faith, for the next note in the reporter's book was simply a date,
+September 12, 1911.
+
+That was the day they had all started West together, traveling in
+Clark's private car, with Lucas, twitching slightly, smiling and
+waving farewell from a window.
+
+The big smash did not come until the middle of October.
+
+Bassett sat back and considered.  He had a fairly clear idea of the
+conditions at the ranch; daily riding, some little reading, and a
+great deal too much of each other.  A sick man, too, unhappy in his
+exile, chafing against his restrictions, lonely and irritable.  The
+girl, early seeing her mistake, and Clark's jealousy of her husband.
+The door into their apartment closing, the thousand and one
+unconscious intimacies between man and wife, the breakfast for two
+going up the stairs, and below that hot-eyed boy, agonized and
+passionately jealous, yet meeting them and looking after them, their
+host and a gentleman.
+
+Lucas took to drinking, after a time, to allay his sheer boredom.
+And Jud Clark drank with him.  At the end of three weeks they were
+both drinking heavily, and were politely quarrelsome.  Bassett
+could fill that in also.  He could see the girl protesting, watching,
+increasingly anxious as she saw that Clark's jealousy was matched
+by her husband's.
+
+A queer picture, he reflected, the three of them shut away on the
+great ranch, and every day some new tension, some new strain.
+
+Then, one night at dinner, they quarreled, and Beverly left the
+table.  She was going to pack her things and go back to New York.
+She had felt, probably, that something was bound to snap.  And while
+she was upstairs Clark had shot and killed Howard Lucas, and himself
+disappeared.
+
+He had run, testimony at the inquest revealed, to the corral, and
+saddled a horse.  Although it was only October, it was snowing hard,
+but in spite of that he had turned his horse toward the mountains.
+By midnight a posse from Norada had started out, and another up the
+Dry River Canyon, but the storm turned into a blizzard in the
+mountains, and they were obliged to turn back.  A few inches more
+snow, and they could not have got their horses out.  A week or so
+later, with a crust of ice over it, a few of them began again, with
+no expectation, however, of finding Clark alive.  They came across
+his horse on the second day, but they did not find him, and there
+were some among them who felt that, after all, old Elihu Clark's
+boy had chosen the better way.
+
+Bassett closed his notebook and lighted a cigar.
+
+There was a big story to be had for the seeking, a whale of a story.
+He could go to the office, give them a hint, draw expense money and
+start for Norada the next night.  He knew well enough that he would
+have to begin there, and that it would not be easy.  Witnesses of
+the affair at the ranch would be missing now, or when found the
+first accuracy of their statements would either be dulled by time or
+have been added to with the passing years.  The ranch itself might
+have passed into other hands.  To reconstruct the events of ten
+years ago might be impossible, or nearly so.  But that was not his
+problem.  He would have to connect Norada with Haverly, Clark with
+Livingstone.  One thing only was simple.  If he found Livingstone's
+story was correct, that he had lived on a ranch near Norada before
+the crime and as Livingstone, then he would acknowledge that two men
+could look precisely alike and come from the same place, and yet not
+be the same.  If not--
+
+But, after he had turned out his light and got into bed, he began
+to feel a certain distaste for his self-appointed task.  If
+Livingstone were Clark, if after years of effort he had pulled
+himself up by his own boot-straps, had made himself a man out of
+the reckless boy he had been, a decent and useful citizen, why pull
+him down?  After all, the world hadn't lost much in Lucas; a sleek,
+not over-intelligent big animal, that had been Howard Lucas.
+
+He decided to sleep over it, and by morning he found himself not
+only disinclined to the business, but firmly resolved to let it drop.
+Things were well enough as they were.  The woman in the case was
+making good.  Jud was making good.  And nothing would restore Howard
+Lucas to that small theatrical world of his which had waved him
+good-bye at the station so long ago.
+
+He shaved and dressed, his resolution still holding.  He had indeed
+almost a conscious glow of virtue, for he was making one of those
+inglorious and unsung sacrifices which ought to bring a man credit
+in the next world, because they certainly got him nowhere in this.
+He was quite affable to the colored waiter who served his breakfasts
+in the bachelor apartment house, and increased his weekly tip to a
+dollar and a half.  Then he sat down and opened the Times-Republican,
+skimming over it after his habit for his own space, and frowning over
+a row of exclamation and interrogation points unwittingly set behind
+the name of the mayor.
+
+On the second page, however, he stopped, coffee cup in air.  "Is
+Judson Clark alive?  Wife of former ranch manager makes confession."
+
+A woman named Margaret Donaldson, it appeared, fatally injured by
+an automobile near the town of Norada, Wyoming, had made a confession
+on her deathbed.  In it she stated that, afraid to die without
+shriving her soul, she had sent for the sheriff of Dallas County and
+had made the following confession:
+
+That following the tragedy at the Clark ranch her husband, John
+Donaldson, since dead, had immediately following the inquest, where
+he testified, started out into the mountains in the hope of finding
+Clark alive, as he knew of a deserted ranger's cabin where Clark
+sometimes camped when hunting.  It was his intention to search for
+Clark at this cabin and effect his escape.  He carried with him food
+and brandy.
+
+That, owing to the blizzard, he was very nearly frozen; that he was
+obliged to abandon his horse, shooting it before he did so, and that,
+close to death himself, he finally reached the cabin and there found
+Judson Clark, the fugitive, who was very ill.
+
+She further testified that her husband cared for Clark for four days,
+Clark being delirious at the time, and that on the fifth day he
+started back on foot for the Clark ranch, having left Clark locked
+in the cabin, and that on the following night he took three horses,
+two saddled, and one packed with food and supplies.  That accompanied
+by herself they went back to the cabin in the mountains and that she
+remained there to care for Clark, while her husband returned to the
+ranch, to prevent suspicion.
+
+That, a day or so later, looking out of her window, she had
+perceived a man outside in the snow coming toward the cabin, and
+that she had thought it one of the searching party.  That her first
+instinct had been to lock him outside, but that she had finally
+admitted him, and that thereafter he had remained and had helped
+her to care for the sick man.
+
+Unfortunately for the rest of the narrative it appeared that the
+injured woman had here lapsed into a coma, and had subsequently
+died, carrying her further knowledge with her.
+
+But, the article went on, the story opened a field of infinite
+surmise.  In all probability Judson Clark was still alive, living
+under some assumed identity, free of punishment, outwardly
+respectable.  Three years before he had been adjudged legally
+dead, and the estate divided, under bond of the legatees.
+
+Close to a hundred million dollars had gone to charities, and
+Judson Clark, wherever he was, would be dependent on his own efforts
+for existence.  He could have summoned all the legal talent in the
+country to his defense, but instead he had chosen to disappear.
+
+The whole situation turned on the deposition of Mrs. Donaldson, now
+dead.  The local authorities at Norada maintained that the woman
+had not been sane for several years.  On the other hand, the cabin
+to which she referred was well known, and no search of it had been
+made at the time.  Clark's horse had been found not ten miles from
+the town, and the cabin was buried in snow twenty miles further away.
+If Clark had made that journey on foot he had accomplished the
+impossible.
+
+Certain facts, according to the local correspondent, bore out
+Margaret Donaldson's confession.  Inquiry showed that she was
+supposed to have spent the winter following Judson Clark's crime
+with relatives in Omaha.  She had returned to the ranch the
+following spring.
+
+A detailed description of Judson Clark, and a photograph of him
+accompanied the story.  Bassett re-read the article carefully, and
+swore a little, under his breath.  If he had needed confirmation of
+his suspicions, it lay to his hand.  But the situation had changed
+over night.  There would be a search for Clark now, as wide as the
+knowledge of his disappearance.  Local police authorities would
+turn him up in every city from Maine to the Pacific coast.  Even
+Europe would be on the lookout and South America.
+
+But it was not the police he feared so much as the press.  Not all
+of the papers, but some of them, would go after that story, and send
+their best men on it.  It offered not so much a chance of solution
+as an opportunity to revive the old dramatic story.  He could see,
+when he closed his eyes, the local photographers climbing to that
+cabin and later sending its pictures broadcast, and divers gentlemen
+of the press, eager to pit their wits against ten years of time and
+the ability of a once conspicuous man to hide from the law, packing
+their suitcases for Norada.
+
+No, he couldn't stop now.  He would go on, like the others, and with
+this advantage, that he was morally certain he could lay his hands
+on Clark at any time.  But he would have to prove his case, connect
+it.  Who, for instance, was the other man in the cabin?  He must
+have known who the boy was who lay in that rough bunk, delirious.
+Must have suspected anyhow.  That made him, like the Donaldsons,
+accessory after the fact, and criminally liable.  Small chance of
+him coming out with any confession.  Yet he was the connecting link.
+Must be.
+
+On his third reading the reporter began to visualize the human
+elements of the fight to save the boy; he saw moving before him the
+whole pitiful struggle; the indomitable ranch manager, his
+heart-breaking struggle with the blizzard, the shooting of his horse,
+the careful disarming of suspicion, and later the intrepid woman,
+daring that night ride through snow that had sent the posse back
+to its firesides to the boy, locked in the cabin and raving.
+
+His mind was busy as he packed his suitcase.  Already he had
+forgotten his compunctions of the early morning; he moved about
+methodically, calculating roughly what expense money he would need,
+and the line of attack, if any, required at the office.  Between
+Norada and that old brick house at Haverly lay his story.  Ten
+years of it.  He was closing his bag when he remembered the little
+girl in the blue dress, at the theater.  He straightened and scowled.
+After a moment he snapped the bag shut.  Damn it all, if Clark had
+chosen to He up with a girl, that was on Clark's conscience, not his.
+
+But he was vaguely uncomfortable.
+
+"It's a queer world, Joe," he observed to the waiter, who had come
+in for the breakfast dishes.
+
+
+"Yes, sir.  It is that," said Joe.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+DURING all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside.  Earlier in
+the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light
+stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good.
+For this time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no
+other time.  He was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet
+was to be carefully regulated, and with care he still had long years
+before him.
+
+David slept, his breathing heavy and slow.  In the morning there
+would be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed,
+himself kept watch.  On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly
+figure, dimly outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn
+close sat Dick.
+
+He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no
+untoward symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier
+and more natural, Dick's thoughts wandered.  They went to Elizabeth
+first, and then on and on from that starting point, through the
+years ahead.  He saw the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for
+his return; he saw both their lives united and flowing on together,
+with children, with small cares, with the routine of daily living,
+and behind it all the two of them, hand in hand.
+
+Then his mind turned on himself.  How often in the past ten years
+it had done that!  He had sat off, with a sort of professional
+detachment, and studied his own case.  With the entrance into his
+world of the new science of psycho-analysis he had made now and
+then small, not very sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his
+own unconscious devising.  Not very sincere, for with the increase
+of his own knowledge of the mind he had learned that behind such
+conditions as his lay generally, deeply hidden, the desire to
+forget.  And that behind that there lay, acknowledged or not, fear.
+
+"But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first
+text-books on the new science appeared, and he and David were
+learning the new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with
+contemptuous snorts of derision.  "To forget what?"
+
+"You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly.  "I think
+this man's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for
+one thing.  And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity
+yourself.  You'd fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years,
+you came out of it with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that
+cabin about fifty-six hours.  Forget!  You had plenty to forget."
+
+It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story.  It did not,
+even now.  He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first,
+supplemented the shadowy childish memories that remained to him with
+it, and gradually co-ordinating the two had  built out of them his
+house of the past.
+
+Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his
+father; he was David's brother.  And he had died.  It was the shock
+of that death, according to David, that had sent him into the
+mountains, where David had followed and nursed him back to health.
+
+It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology.
+Not that he had worried about the new psychology in those early days.
+He had been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious.  It had
+been too much trouble even to think.
+
+True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts
+and a few mental pictures.  He had had a certain impatience at first
+over the restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn
+the value of money.  And the pictures he retained had had a certain
+opulence which the facts appeared to contradict.  Thus he remembered
+a large ranch house, and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or
+milling in a corral.  But David had warned him early that there was
+no estate; that his future depended entirely on his own efforts.
+
+Then the new life had caught and held him.  For the first time he
+had mothering and love.  Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern
+to which he meant to conform.  He was happy and contented.
+
+Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire
+to go back and try to reconstruct his past again.  Later on he knew
+that if he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be
+easier in that environment of once familiar things.  But in the
+first days he had been totally dependent on David, and money was
+none too plentiful.  Later on, as the new life took hold, as he
+went to medical college and worked at odd clerical jobs in
+vacations to help pay his way, there had been no chance.  Then the
+war came, and on his return there had been the practice, and his
+knowledge that David's health was not what it should have been.
+
+But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in
+him a peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension.
+He knew more of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not
+physical hardship, but mental stress, caused such lapses as his.
+But what mental stress had been great enough for such a smash?
+His father's death?
+
+Strain and fear, said the new psychology.  Fear?  He had never found
+himself lacking in courage.  Certainly he would have fought a man
+who called him a coward.  But there was cowardice behind all such
+conditions as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality.  It was
+weak.  Weak.  He hated himself for that past failure of his to face
+reality.
+
+But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a
+vengeance.  He was in love, and he wanted the things that love
+should bring to a normal man.  He felt normal.  He felt,
+strengthened by love, that he could face whatever life had to bring,
+so long as also it brought Elizabeth.
+
+Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding
+Sunday night.
+
+"Don't be a fool," David had said.  "Go ahead and take her, if
+she'll have you.  And don't be too long about it.  I'm not as young
+as I used to be."
+
+"What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course,
+if she cares." David had grunted.  "I do know I'm going to try to
+make her care, if it--if it's humanly possible.  But I'd like to
+go back to the ranch again, David, before things go any further."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I'd like to fill the gap.  Attempt it anyhow."
+
+What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was
+David's attitude toward that threatened return of his.  For David
+had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons.
+Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were
+somehow oddly like fear.  David afraid!  David, whose life and
+heart were open books! David, whose eyes never wavered, nor his
+courage!
+
+"You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished.  "You've got
+everything you want.  And a medical man can't afford to go gadding
+about.  When people want him they want him."
+
+But he had noticed that David had been different, since.  He had
+taken to following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken
+once of retiring and turning all the work over to him.  Was it
+possible that David did not want him to go back to Norada?
+
+He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse.  It was stronger, not
+so rapid.  The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of
+David.
+
+He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,
+beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling
+his pulse.  He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now
+that he had been very ill.  The cabin had been a small and lonely
+one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold.
+During the day a woman kept up the fire.  Her name was Maggie, and
+she moved about the cabin like a thin ghost.  At night she slept
+in a lean-to shed and David kept the fire going.  A man who seemed
+to know him well--John Donaldson, he learned, was his name--was
+Maggie's husband, and every so often he came, about dawn, and
+brought food and supplies.
+
+After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and
+David had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the
+beans.  Before she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits,
+and David would study over it painstakingly, and then produce a
+panfull of burned and blackened lumps, over which he would groan
+and agonize.
+
+He himself had been totally incurious.  He had lived a sort of
+animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative
+excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked.  The
+snows came and almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great
+deal, and talked at intervals.  David had tried to fill up the gap
+in his mind.  That was how he learned that David was his father's
+brother, and that his father had recently died.
+
+Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear.
+They had, for instance, never gone back to the ranch at all.  With
+the first clearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had
+appeared again, leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal,
+and they had started off, leaving him standing in the clearing and
+gazing after them.  But they had not followed Donaldson's trail.
+They had started West, over the mountains, and David did not know
+the country.  Once they were lost for three days.
+
+He looked at the figure on the bed.  Only ten years, and yet at
+that time David had been vigorous, seemed almost young.  He had
+aged in that ten years.  On the bed he was an old man, a tired old
+man at that.  On that long ride he had been tireless.  He had taken
+the burden of the nightly camps, and had hacked a trail with his
+hatchet across snow fields while Dick, still weak but furiously
+protesting, had been compelled to stand and watch.
+
+Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearly
+defined issue of David's protest against his return to the West, he
+went again over the details of that winter and spring.  Why had they
+not taken Donaldson's trail?  Or gone back to the ranch?  Why, since
+Donaldson could make it, had not other visitors come?  Another
+doctor, the night he almost died, and David sat under the lamp
+behind the close-screened windows, and read the very pocket
+prayer-book that now lay on the stand beside the bed?  Why had they
+burned his clothes, and Donaldson brought a new outfit?  Why did
+Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a razor, so that when
+they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, they were both full
+bearded?
+
+He brought himself up sharply.  He had allowed his imagination to
+run away with him.  He had been depicting a flight and no one who
+knew David could imagine him in flight.
+
+Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety.
+When David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had
+told Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear
+up the things that bothered him.  After that--
+
+He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity.  He remembered
+her at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious
+emotions, its counterfeit drama.  He had felt moved to comfort her,
+when he found her on the verge of tears.
+
+"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.
+
+"Yes.  But life does do things like that to people."
+
+"Not often.  The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life.
+You and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things
+because we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."
+
+"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"
+
+"A little jam, sometimes.  Or perhaps they drop it, butter side
+down, on the carpet."
+
+"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"
+
+He had had to acknowledge that it might be.  But he had been quite
+emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.
+
+After a long time he slept in his chair.  The spring wind came in
+through the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old
+prayer-book on the stand.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The week that followed was an anxious one.  David's physical
+condition slowly improved.  The slight thickness was gone from his
+speech, and he sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse
+brought at regular intervals.  Over the entire house there hung all
+day the odor of stewing chicken or of beef tea in the making, and
+above the doorbell was a white card which said: "Don't ring.
+Walk in."
+
+As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson's
+confession in the newspaper.  Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least.
+Appearing, as it did, the morning after David's stroke, it came in
+with the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again,
+to start a fire or line a pantry shelf.  Harrison Miller, next door,
+read it over his coffee.  Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train
+glanced at it and glanced away.  Nina Ward read it in bed.  And
+that was all.
+
+There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers
+of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also.
+A table in David's room held a steadily growing number of bedroom
+slippers, and Mrs.  Morgan had been seen buying soles for still
+others.  David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these
+votive offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled
+silence that worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby.  Something had
+happened, she was sure.  Something connected with Dick.  She watched
+David when Dick was in the room, and she saw that his eyes followed
+the younger man with something very like terror.
+
+And for the first time since he had walked into the house that night
+so long ago, followed by the tall young man for whose coming a
+letter had prepared her, she felt that David had withdrawn himself
+from her.  She went about her daily tasks a little hurt, and waited
+for him to choose his own time.  But, as the days went on, she saw
+that whatever this new thing might be, he meant to fight it out
+alone, and that the fighting it out alone was bad for him.  He
+improved very slowly.
+
+She wondered, sometimes, if it was after all because of Dick's
+growing interest in Elizabeth Wheeler.  She knew that he was seeing
+her daily, although he was too busy now for more than a hasty call.
+She felt that she could even tell when he had seen her; he would
+come in, glowing and almost exalted, and, as if to make up for the
+moments stolen from David, would leap up the stairs two at a time
+and burst into the invalid's room like a cheerful cyclone.  Wasn't
+it possible that David had begun to feel as she did, that the girl
+was entitled to a clean slate before she pledged herself to Dick?
+And the slate--poor Dick!--could never be cleaned.
+
+Then, one day, David astonished them both.  He was propped up in
+his bed, and he had demanded a cigar, and been very gently but
+firmly refused.  He had been rather sulky about it, and Dick had
+been attempting to rally him into better humor when he said suddenly:
+
+"I've had time to think things over, Dick.  I haven't been fair to
+you.  You're thrown away here.  Besides--" he hesitated.  Then:
+"We might as well face it.  The day of the general practitioner
+has gone."
+
+"I don't believe it," Dick said stoutly.  "Maybe we are only
+signposts to point the way to the other fellows, but the world will
+always need signposts."
+
+"What I've been thinking of," David pursued his own train of thought,
+"is this: I want you to go to Johns Hopkins and take up the special
+work you've been wanting to do.  I'll be up soon and--"
+
+"Call the nurse, Aunt Lucy," said Dick.  "He's raving."
+
+"Not at all," David retorted testily.  "I've told you.  This whole
+town only comes here now to be told what specialist to go to, and
+you know it."
+
+"I don't know anything of the sort."
+
+"If you don't, it's because you won't face the facts."  Dick
+chuckled, and threw an arm over David's shoulder, "You old
+hypocrite!" he said.  "You're trying to get rid of me, for some
+reason.  Don't tell me you're going to get married!"
+
+But David did not smile.  Lucy, watching him from her post by the
+window, saw his face and felt a spasm of fear.  At the most, she
+had feared a mental conflict in David.  Now she saw that it might
+be something infinitely worse, something impending and immediate.
+She could hardly reply when Dick appealed to her.
+
+"Are you going to let him get rid of me like this, Aunt Lucy?" he
+demanded.  "Sentenced to Johns Hopkins, like Napoleon to St. Helena!
+Are you with me, or forninst me?"
+
+"I don't know, Dick," she said, with her eyes on David.  "If it's
+for your good--"
+
+She went out after a time, leaving them at it hammer and tongs.
+David was vanquished in the end, but Dick, going down to the office
+later on, was puzzled.  Somehow it was borne in on him that behind
+David's insistence was a reason, unspoken but urgent, and the only
+reason that occurred to him as possible was that David did not,
+after all, want him to marry Elizabeth Wheeler.  He put the matter
+to the test that night, wandering in in dressing-gown and slippers,
+as was his custom before going to bed, for a brief chat.  The nurse
+was downstairs, and Dick moved about the room restlessly.  Then he
+stopped and stood by the bed, looking down.
+
+"A few nights ago, David, I asked you if you thought it would be
+right for me to marry; if my situation justified it, and if to your
+knowledge there was any other reason why I could not or should not.
+You said there was not."
+
+"There is no reason, of course.  If she'll have you."
+
+"I don't know that.  I know that whether she will or not is a pretty
+vital matter to me, David."
+
+David nodded, silently.
+
+"But now you want me to go away.  To leave her.  You're rather
+urgent about it.  And I feel-well I begin to think you have a reason
+for it."
+
+David clenched his hands under the bed-clothing, but he returned
+Dick's gaze steadily.
+
+"She's a good girl," he said.  "But she's entitled to more than
+you can give her, the way things are."
+
+"That is presupposing that she cares for me.  I haven't an idea
+that she does.  That she may, in time-- Then, that's the reason
+for this Johns Hopkins thing, is it?"
+
+"That's the reason," David said stoutly.  "She would wait for you.
+She's that sort.  I've known her all her life.  She's as steady
+as a rock.  But she's been brought up to have a lot of things.
+Walter Wheeler is well off.  You do as I want you to; pack your
+things and go to Baltimore.  Bring Reynolds down here to look
+after the work until I'm around again."
+
+But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another
+line of thought.
+
+"Of course you understand," he observed, after a renewal of his
+restless pacing, "that I've got to tell her my situation first.  I
+don't need to tell you that I funk doing it, but it's got to be done."
+
+"Don't be a fool," David said querulously.  "You'll set a lot of
+women cackling, and what they don't know they'll invent.  I know
+ 'em."
+
+"Only herself and her family."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because they have a right to know it."
+
+But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the
+subject.
+
+"I'll not do it until we've gone into it together," he promised.
+"There's plenty of time.  You settle down now and get ready for
+sleep."
+
+When the nurse came in at eleven o'clock she found Dick gone and
+David, very still, with his face to the wall.
+
+It was the end of May before David began to move about his upper
+room.  The trees along the shaded streets had burst into full leaf
+by that time, and Mike was enjoying that gardener's interval of
+paradise when flowers grow faster than the weeds among them.
+Harrison Miller, having rolled his lawn through all of April, was
+heard abroad in the early mornings with the lawn mower or hoe in
+hand was to be seen behind his house in his vegetable patch.
+
+Cars rolled through the streets, the rear seats laden with blossoming
+loot from the country lanes, and the Wheeler dog was again burying
+bones in the soft warm ground under the hedge.
+
+Elizabeth Wheeler was very happy.  Her look of expectant waiting,
+once vague, had crystallized now into definite form.  She was
+waiting, timidly and shyly but with infinite content.  In time,
+everything would come.  And in the meantime there was to-day, and
+some time to-day a shabby car would stop at the door, and there
+would be five minutes, or ten.  And then Dick would have to hurry
+to work, or back to David.  After that, of course, to-day was over,
+but there would always be to-morrow.
+
+Now and then, at choir practice or at service, she saw Clare
+Rossiter.  But Clare was very cool to her, and never on any account
+sought her, or spoke to her alone.  She was rather unhappy about
+Clare, when she remembered her.  Because it must be so terrible to
+care for a man who only said, when one spoke of Clare, "Oh, the tall
+blonde girl?"
+
+Once or twice, too, she had found Clare's eyes on her, and they
+were hostile eyes.  It was almost as though they said:
+"I hate you because you know.  But don't dare to pity me."
+
+Yet, somehow, Elizabeth found herself not entirely believing that
+Clare's passion was real.  Because the real thing you hid with all
+your might, at least until you were sure it was wanted.  After that,
+of course, you could be so proud of it that you might become utterly
+shameless.  She was afraid sometimes that she was the sort to be
+utterly shameless.  Yet, for all her halcyon hours, there were
+little things that worried her.  Wallie Sayre, for instance, always
+having to be kept from saying things she didn't want to hear.  And
+Nina.  She wasn't sure that Nina was entirely happy.  And, of
+course, there was Jim.
+
+Jim was difficult.  Sometimes he was a man, and then again he was
+a boy, and one never knew just which he was going to be.  He was
+too old for discipline and too young to manage himself.  He was
+spending almost all his evenings away from home now, and her mother
+always drew an inaudible sigh when he was spoken of.
+
+Elizabeth had waited up for him one night, only a short time before,
+and beckoning him into her room, had talked to him severely.
+
+"You ought to be ashamed, Jim," she said.  "You're simply worrying
+mother sick."
+
+"Well, why?" he demanded defiantly.  "I'm old enough to take care
+of myself."
+
+"You ought to be taking care of her, too."
+
+He had looked rather crestfallen at that, and before he went out
+he offered a half-sheepish explanation.
+
+"I'd tell them where I go," he said, "but you'd think a pool room
+was on the direct road to hell.  Take to-night, now.  I can't tell
+them about it, but it was all right.  I met Wallie Sayre and Leslie
+at the club before dinner, and we got a fourth and played bridge.
+Only half a cent a point.  I swear we were going on playing, but
+somebody brought in a chap named Gregory for a cocktail.  He turned
+out to be a brother of Beverly Carlysle, the actress, and he took
+us around to the theater and gave us a box.  Not a thing wrong with
+it, was there?"
+
+"Where did you go from there?" she persisted inexorably.  "It's
+half past one."
+
+"Went around and met her.  She's wonderful, Elizabeth.  But do you
+know what would happen if I told them?  They'd have a fit."
+
+She felt rather helpless, because she knew he was right from his
+own standpoint.
+
+"I know.  I'm surprised at Les, Jim."
+
+"Oh, Les! He just trailed along.  He's all right."
+
+She kissed him and he went out, leaving her to lie awake for a long
+time.  She would have had all her world happy those days, and all
+her world good.  She didn't want anybody's bread and butter spilled
+on the carpet.
+
+So the days went on, and the web slowly wove itself into its
+complicated pattern: Bassett speeding West, and David in his quiet
+room; Jim and Leslie Ward seeking amusement, and finding it in the
+littered dressing-room of a woman star at a local theater; Clare
+Rossiter brooding, and the little question being whispered behind
+hands, figuratively, of course--the village was entirely well-bred;
+Gregory calling round to see Bassett, and turning away with the
+information that he had gone away for an indefinite time; and Maggie
+Donaldson, lying in the cemetery at the foot of the mountains
+outside Norada, having shriven her soul to the limit of her strength
+so that she might face her Maker.
+
+Out of all of them it was Clare Rossiter who made the first conscious
+move of the shuttle; Clare, affronted and not a little malicious, but
+perhaps still dramatizing herself, this time as the friend who feels
+forced to carry bad tidings.  Behind even that, however, was an
+unconscious desire to see Dick again, and this time so to impress
+herself on him that never again could he pass her in the street
+unnoticed.
+
+On the day, then, that David first sat up in bed Clare went to the
+house and took her place in the waiting-room.  She was dressed with
+extreme care, and she carried a parasol.  With it, while she waited,
+she drilled small nervous indentations in the old office carpet,
+and formulated her line of action.
+
+Nevertheless she found it hard to begin.
+
+"I don't want to keep you, if you're busy," she said, avoiding his
+eyes.  "If you are in a hurry--"
+
+"This is my business," he said patiently.  And waited.
+
+"I wonder if you are going to understand me, when I do begin?"
+
+"You sound alarmingly ominous." He smiled at her, and she had a
+moment of panic.  "You don't look like a young lady with anything
+eating at her damask cheek, or however it goes."
+
+"Doctor Livingstone," she said suddenly, "people are saying something
+about you that you ought to know."
+
+He stared at her, amazed and incredulous.
+
+"About me?  What can they say?  That's absurd."
+
+"I felt you ought to know.  Of course I don't believe it.  Not for
+a moment.  But you know what this town is."
+
+"I know it's a very good town," he said steadily.  "However, let's
+have it.  I daresay it is not very serious."
+
+She was uneasy enough by that time, and rather frightened when she
+had finished.  For he sat, quiet and rather pale, not looking at
+her at all, but gazing fixedly at an old daguerreotype of David
+that stood on his desk.  One that Lucy had shown him one day and
+which he had preempted; David at the age of eight, in a small black
+velvet suit and with very thin legs.
+
+"I thought you ought to know," she justified herself, nervously.
+
+Dick got up.
+
+"Yes," he said.  "I ought to know, of course.  Thank you."
+
+When she had gone he went back and stood before the picture again.
+From Clare's first words he had had a stricken conviction that the
+thing was true; that, as Mrs. Cook Morgan's visitor from Wyoming
+had insisted, Henry Livingstone had never married, never had a son.
+He stood and gazed at the picture.  His world had collapsed about
+him, but he was steady and very erect.
+
+"David, David!" he thought.  "Why did you do it?  And what am I?
+And who?"
+
+Characteristically his first thought after that was of David himself.
+Whatever David had done, his motive had been right.  He would have
+to start with that.  If David had built for him a false identity it
+was because there was a necessity for it.  Something shameful,
+something he was to be taken away from.  Wasn't it probable that
+David had heard the gossip, and had then collapsed?  Wasn't the fear
+that he himself would hear it behind David's insistence that he go
+to Baltimore?
+
+His thoughts flew to Elizabeth.  Everything was changed now, as to
+Elizabeth.  He would have to be very certain of that past of his
+before he could tell her that he loved her, and he had a sense of
+immediate helplessness.  He could not go to David, as things were.
+To Lucy?
+
+Probably he would have gone to Lucy at once, but the telephone rang.
+He answered it, got his hat and bag and went out to the car.  Years
+with David had made automatic the subordination of self to the
+demands of the practice.
+
+At half past six Lucy heard him come in and go into his office.
+When he did not immediately reappear and take his flying run up
+the stairs to David's room, she stood outside the office door and
+listened.  She had a premonition of something wrong, something of
+the truth, perhaps.  Anyhow, she tapped at the door and opened it,
+to find him sitting very quietly at his desk with his head in his
+hands.
+
+"Dick!" she exclaimed.  "Is anything wrong?"
+
+"I have a headache," he said.  He looked at his watch and got up.
+"I'll take a look at David, and then we'll have dinner.  I didn't
+know it was so late."
+
+But when she had gone out he did not immediately move.  He had been
+going over again, painfully and carefully, the things that puzzled
+him, that he had accepted before without dispute.  David and Lucy's
+reluctance to discuss his father; the long days in the cabin, with
+David helping him to reconstruct his past; the spring, and that slow
+progress which now he felt, somehow, had been an escape.
+
+He ate very little dinner, and Lucy's sense of dread increased.
+When, after the meal, she took refuge in her sitting-room on the
+lower floor and picked up her knitting, it was with a conviction
+that it was only a temporary reprieve.  She did not know from what.
+
+She heard him, some time later, coming down from David's room.  But
+he did not turn into his office.  Instead, he came on to her door,
+stood for a moment like a man undecided, then came in.  She did not
+look up, even when very gently he took her knitting from her and
+laid it on the table.
+
+"Aunt Lucy."
+
+"Yes, Dick."
+
+"Don't you think we'd better have a talk?"
+
+"What about?" she asked, with her heart hammering.
+
+"About me." He stood above her, and looked down, still with the
+tenderness with which he always regarded her, but with resolution
+in his very attitude.  "First of all, I'll tell you something.
+Then I'll ask you to tell me all you can."
+
+She yearned over him as he told her, for all her terror.  His voice,
+for all its steadiness, was strained.
+
+"I have felt for some time," he finished, "that you and David were
+keeping something from me.  I think, now, that this is what it was.
+Of course, you realize that I shall have to know."
+
+"Dick! Dick!" was all she could say.
+
+"I was about," he went on, with his almost terrible steadiness, "to
+ask a girl to take my name.  I want to know if I have a name to
+offer her.  I have, you see, only two alternatives to believe about
+myself.  Either I am Henry Livingstone's illegitimate son, and in
+that case I have no right to my name, or to offer it to any one, or
+I am--"
+
+He made a despairing gesture.
+
+"--or I am some one else, some one who was smuggled out of the
+mountains and given an identity that makes him a living lie."
+
+Always she had known that this might come some time, but always
+too she had seen David bearing the brunt of it.  He should bear it.
+It was not of her doing or of her approving.  For years the danger
+of discovery had hung over her like a cloud.
+
+"Do you know which?" he persisted.
+
+"Yes, Dick."
+
+"Would you have the unbelievable cruelty not to tell me?"
+
+She got up, a taut little figure with a dignity born of her fear
+and of her love for him.
+
+"I shall not betray David's confidence," she said.  "Long ago I
+warned him that this time would come.  I was never in favor of
+keeping you in ignorance.  But it is David's problem, and I cannot
+take the responsibility of telling you."
+
+He knew her determination and her obstinate loyalty.  But he was
+fairly desperate.
+
+"You know that if you don't tell me, I shall go to David?"
+
+"If you go now you will kill him."
+
+"It's as bad as that, is it?" he asked grimly.  "Then there is
+something shameful behind it, is there?"
+
+"No, no, Dick.  Not that.  And I want you, always, to remember this.
+What David did was out of love for you.  He has made many sacrifices
+for you.  First he saved your life, and then he made you what you
+are.  And he has had a great pride in it.  Don't destroy his work
+of years."
+
+Her voice broke and she turned to go out, her chin quivering, but
+half way to the door he called to her.
+
+"Aunt Lucy--" he said gently.
+
+She heard him behind her, felt his strong arms as he turned her
+about.  He drew her to him and stooping, kissed her cheek.
+
+"You're right," he said.  "Always right.  I'll not worry him with it.
+My word of honor.  When the time comes he'll tell me, and until it
+comes, I'll wait.  And I love you both.  Don't ever forget that."
+
+He kissed her again and let her go.
+
+But long after David had put down his prayer-book that night, and
+after the nurse had rustled down the stairs to the night supper on
+the dining-room table, Lucy lay awake and listened to Dick's slow
+pacing of his bedroom floor.
+
+He was very gentle with David from that time on, and tried to return
+to his old light-hearted ways.  On the day David was to have his
+first broiled sweetbread he caught the nurse outside, borrowed her
+cap and apron and carried in the tray himself.
+
+"I hope your food is to your taste, Doctor David," he said, in a
+high falsetto which set the nurse giggling in the hall.  "I may not
+be much of a nurse, but I can cook."
+
+Even Lucy was deceived at times.  He went his customary round, sent
+out the monthly bills, opened and answered David's mail, bore the
+double burden of David's work and his own ungrudgingly, but off
+guard he was grave and abstracted.  He began to look very thin, too,
+and Lucy often heard him pacing the floor at night.  She thought
+that he seldom or never went to the Wheelers'.
+
+And so passed the tenth day of David's illness, with the smile on
+Elizabeth's face growing a trifle fixed as three days went by
+without the shabby car rattling to the door; with "The Valley"
+playing its second and final week before going into New York; and
+with Leslie Ward unconsciously taking up the shuttle Clare had
+dropped, and carrying the pattern one degree further toward
+completion.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+JUST how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the
+star of "The Valley" he was not certain himself.  Innocuous it
+certainly was.  Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder sometimes
+if it had not been precisely for the purpose it served.  But that
+was long months after.  Not until the pattern was completed and he
+was able to recognize his own work in it.
+
+The truth was that he was not too happy at home.  Nina's smart
+little house on the Ridgely Road had at first kept her busy.  She
+had spent unlimited time with decorators, had studied and rejected
+innumerable water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction
+rooms and bid recklessly on things she felt at the moment she could
+not do without, later on to have to wheedle Leslie into
+straightening her bank balance.  Thought, too, and considerable
+energy had gone into training and outfitting her servants, and still
+more into inducing them to wear the expensive uniforms and livery
+she provided.
+
+But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather than a home.
+There were times, indeed, when Leslie began to feel that it was not
+even a house, but a small hotel.  They almost never dined alone,
+and when they did Nina would explain that everybody was tied up.
+Then, after dinner, restlessness would seize her, and she would want
+to run in to the theater, or to make a call.  If he refused, she
+nursed a grievance all evening.
+
+And he did not like her friends.  Things came to a point where, when
+he knew one of the gay evenings was on, he would stay in town,
+playing billiards at his club, or occasionally wandering into a
+theater, where he stood or sat at the back of the house and watched
+the play with cynical, discontented eyes.
+
+The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction to his sister
+brought a new interest.  Perhaps the very novelty was what first
+attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of
+friendship, for it amounted to that with surprising quickness,
+with a famous woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning
+paper or, huge and shockingly colored, from the sheets on the bill
+boards.
+
+He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons at her hotel,
+and he saw that she liked it.  It was often lonely, she explained.
+He sent her flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and
+restful, and sometimes, when she was off guard, with the lines of
+old suffering in her face.
+
+She sat still.  She didn't fidget, as Nina did.  She listened, too.
+She was not as beautiful as she appeared on the stage, but she was
+attractive, and he stilled his conscience with the knowledge that
+she placed no undue emphasis on his visits.  In her world men came
+and went, brought or sent small tribute, and she was pleased and
+grateful.  No more.  The next week, or the week after, and other
+men in other places would be doing the same things.
+
+But he wondered about her, sometimes.  Did she ever think of Judson
+Clark, and the wreck he had made of her life?  What of resentment
+and sorrow lay behind her quiet face, or the voice with its careful
+intonations which was so unlike Nina's?
+
+Now and then he saw her brother.  He neither liked nor disliked
+Gregory, but he suspected him of rather bullying Beverly.  On the
+rare occasions when he saw them together there was a sort of nervous
+tension in the air, and although Leslie was not subtle he sensed
+some hidden difference between them.  A small incident one day
+almost brought this concealed dissension to a head.  He said to
+Gregory:
+
+"By the way, I saw you in Haverly yesterday afternoon."
+
+"Must have seen somebody else.  Haverly?  Where's Haverly?"
+
+Leslie Ward had been rather annoyed.  There had been no mistake
+about the recognition.  But he passed it off with that curious sense
+of sex loyalty that will actuate a man even toward his enemies.
+
+"Funny," he said.  "Chap looked like you.  Maybe a little heavier."
+
+Nevertheless he had a conviction that he had said something better
+left unsaid, and that Beverly Carlysle's glance at her brother was
+almost hostile.  He had that instantaneous picture of the two of
+them, the man defiant and somehow frightened, and the woman's eyes
+anxious and yet slightly contemptuous.  Then, in a flash, it was
+gone.
+
+He had meant to go home that evening, would have, probably, for he
+was not ignorant of where he was drifting.  But when he went back
+to the office Nina was on the wire, with the news that they were
+to go with a party to a country inn.
+
+"For chicken and waffles, Les," she said.  "It will be oceans of
+fun.  And I've promised the cocktails."
+
+"I'm tired," he replied, sulkily.  "And why don't you let some of
+the other fellows come over with the drinks?  It seems to me I'm
+always the goat."
+
+"Oh, if that's the way you feel!" Nina said, and hung up the
+receiver.
+
+He did not go home.  He went to the theater and stood at the back,
+with his sense of guilt deadened by the knowledge that Nina was
+having what she would call a heavenly time.  After all, it would
+soon be over.  He counted the days.  "The Valley" had only four
+more before it moved on.
+
+He had already played his small part in the drama that involved
+Dick Livingstone, but he was unaware of it.  He went home that
+night, to find Nina settled in bed and very sulky, and he retired
+himself in no pleasant frame of mind.  But he took a firmer hold
+of himself that night before he slept.  He didn't want a smash,
+and yet they might be headed that way.  He wouldn't see Beverly
+Carlysle again.
+
+He lived up to his resolve the next day, bought his flowers as
+usual, but this time for Nina and took them with him.  And went
+home with the orchids which were really an offering to his own
+conscience.
+
+But Nina was not at home.  The butler reported that she was dining
+at the Wheelers', and he thought the man eyed him with restrained
+commiseration.
+
+"Did she say I am expected there?" he asked.
+
+"She ordered dinner for you here, sir."
+
+Even for Nina that sounded odd.  He took his coat and went out
+again to the car; after a moment's hesitation he went back and
+got the orchids.
+
+Dick Livingstone's machine was at the curb before the Wheeler house,
+and in the living-room he found Walter Wheeler, pacing the floor.
+Mr.  Wheeler glanced at him and looked away.
+
+"Anybody sick?" Leslie asked, his feeling of apprehension growing.
+
+"Nina is having hysterics upstairs," Mr. Wheeler said, and continued
+his pacing.
+
+"Nina! Hysterics?"
+
+"That's what I said," replied Mr. Wheeler, suddenly savage.
+"You've made a nice mess of things, haven't you?"
+
+Leslie placed the box of orchids on the table and drew off his
+gloves.  His mind was running over many possibilities.
+
+"You'd better tell me about it, hadn't you?"
+
+"Oh, I will.  Don't worry.  I've seen this coming for months.  I'm
+not taking her part.  God knows I know her, and she has as much
+idea of making a home as--as"--he looked about--"as that poker
+has.  But that's the worst you can say of her.  As to you--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+Mr.  Wheeler's anxiety was greater than his anger.  He lowered his
+voice.
+
+"She got a bill to-day for two or three boxes of flowers, sent to
+some actress." And when Leslie said nothing, "I'm not condoning it,
+mind you.  You'd no business to do it.  But," he added fretfully,
+"why the devil, if you've got to act the fool, don't you have your
+bills sent to your office?"
+
+"I suppose I don't need to tell you that's all there was to it?
+Flowers, I mean."
+
+"I'm taking that for granted.  But she says she won't go back."
+
+Leslie was aghast and frightened.  Not at the threat; she would go
+back, of course.  But she would always hold it against him.  She
+cherished small grudges faithfully.  And he knew she would never
+understand, never see her own contribution to his mild defection,
+nor comprehend the actual innocence of those afternoons of tea
+and talk.
+
+There was no sound from upstairs.  Mr. Wheeler got his hat and went
+out, calling to the dog.  Jim came in whistling, looked in and said:
+"Hello, Les," and disappeared.  He sat in the growing twilight and
+cursed himself for a fool.  After all, where had he been heading?
+A man couldn't eat his cake and have it.  But he was resentful, too;
+he stressed rather hard his own innocence, and chose to ignore the
+less innocent impulse that lay behind it.
+
+After a half hour or so he heard some one descending and Dick
+Livingstone appeared in the hall.  He called to him, and Dick entered
+the room.  Before he sat down he lighted a cigarette and in the
+flare of the match Leslie got an impression of fatigue and of
+something new, of trouble.  But his own anxieties obsessed him.
+
+"She's told you about it, I suppose?"
+
+"I was a fool, of course.  But it was only a matter of a few
+flowers and some afternoon calls.  She's a fine woman, Livingstone,
+and she is lonely.  The women have given her a pretty cold deal
+since the Clark story.  They copy her clothes and her walk, but
+they don't ask her into their homes."
+
+"Isn't the trouble more fundamental than that, Ward?  I was
+thinking about it upstairs.  Nina was pretty frank.  She says you've
+had your good time and want to settle down, and that she is young
+and now is her only chance.  Later on there may be children, you
+know.  She blames herself, too, but she has a fairly clear idea of
+how it happened."
+
+"Do you think she'll go back home?"
+
+"She promised she would."
+
+They sat smoking in silence.  In the dining-room Annie was laying
+the table for dinner, and a most untragic odor of new garden peas
+began to steal along the hall.  Dick suddenly stirred and threw away
+his cigarette.
+
+"I was going to talk to you about something else," he said, "but
+this is hardly the time.  I'll get on home." He rose.  "She'll be
+all right.  Only I'd advise very tactful handling and--the
+fullest explanation you can make."
+
+"What is it?  I'd be glad to have something to keep my mind
+occupied.  It's eating itself up just now."
+
+"It's a personal matter."
+
+Ward glanced up at him quickly.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you happened to hear a story that I believe is going round?
+One that concerns me?"
+
+"Well, I have," Leslie admitted.  "I didn't pay much attention.
+Nobody is taking it very seriously."
+
+"That's not the point," Dick persisted.  "I don't mind idle gossip.
+I don't give a damn about it.  It's the statement itself."
+
+"I should say that you are the only person who knows anything
+about it."
+
+Dick made a restless, impatient gesture.
+
+"I want to know one thing more," he said.  "Nina told you, I suppose.
+Does--I suppose Elizabeth knows it, too?"
+
+"I rather think she does."
+
+Dick turned abruptly and went out of the room, and a moment later
+Leslie heard the front door slam.  Elizabeth, standing at the head
+of the stairs, heard it also, and turned away, with a new droop to
+her usually valiant shoulders.  Her world, too, had gone awry, that
+safe world of protection and cheer and kindliness.  First had come
+Nina, white-lipped and shaken, and Elizabeth had had to face the
+fact that there were such things as treachery and the queer hidden
+things that men did, and that came to light and brought horrible
+suffering.
+
+And that afternoon she had had to acknowledge that there was
+something wrong with Dick.  No.  Between Dick and herself.  There
+was a formality in his speech to her, an aloofness that seemed to
+ignore utterly their new intimacy.  He was there, but he was miles
+away from her.  She tried hard to feel indignant, but she was only
+hurt.
+
+Peace seemed definitely to have abandoned the Wheeler house.  Then
+late in the evening a measure of it was restored when Nina and Leslie
+effected a reconciliation.  It followed several bad hours when Nina
+had locked her door against them all, but at ten o'clock she sent for
+Leslie and faced him with desperate calmness.
+
+To Elizabeth, putting cold cloths on her mother's head as she lay
+on the bed, there came a growing conviction that the relation
+between men and women was a complicated and baffling thing, and
+that love and hate were sometimes close together.
+
+Love, and habit perhaps, triumphed in Nina's case, however, for at
+eleven o'clock they heard Leslie going down the stairs and later
+on moving about the kitchen and pantry while whistling softly.  The
+servants had gone, and the air was filled with the odor of burning
+bread.  Some time later Mrs. Wheeler, waiting uneasily in the upper
+hall, beheld her son-in-law coming up and carrying proudly a tray
+on which was toast of an incredible blackness, and a pot which
+smelled feebly of tea.
+
+"The next time you're out of a cook just send for me," he said
+cheerfully.
+
+Mrs. Wheeler, full and overflowing with indignation and the piece
+of her mind she had meant to deliver, retired vanquished to her
+bedroom.
+
+Late that night when Nina had finally forgiven him and had settled
+down for sleep, Leslie went downstairs for a cigar, to find Elizabeth
+sitting there alone, a book on her knee, face down, and her eyes
+wistful and with a question in them.
+
+"Sitting and thinking, or just sitting?" he inquired.
+
+"I was thinking."
+
+"Air-castles, eh?  Well, be sure you put the right man into them!"
+He felt more or less a fool for having said that, for it was
+extremely likely that Nina's family was feeling some doubt about
+Nina's choice.
+
+"What I mean is," he added hastily, "don't be a fool and take Wallie
+Sayre.  Take a man, while you're about it."
+
+"I would, if I could do the taking."
+
+"That's piffle, Elizabeth." He sat down on the arm of a chair and
+looked at her.  "Look here, what about this story the Rossiter
+girl and a few others are handing around about Dick Livingstone?
+You're not worrying about it, are you?"
+
+"I don't believe it's true, and it wouldn't matter to me, anyhow."
+
+"Good for you," he said heartily, and got up.  "You'd better go to
+bed, young lady.  It's almost midnight."
+
+But although she rose she made no further move to go.
+
+"What I am worrying about is this, Leslie.  He may hear it."
+
+"He has heard it, honey."
+
+He had expected her to look alarmed, but instead she showed relief.
+
+"I'll tell you the truth, Les," she said.  "I was worrying.  I'm
+terribly fond of him.  It just came all at once, and I couldn't help
+it.  And I thought he liked me, too, that way."  She stopped and
+looked up at him to see if he understood, and he nodded gravely.
+"Then to-day, when he came to see Nina, he avoided me.  He--I was
+waiting in the hall upstairs, and he just said a word or two and
+went on down."
+
+"Poor devil!" Leslie said.  "You see, he's in an unpleasant
+position, to say the least.  But here's a thought to go to sleep
+on.  If you ask me, he's keeping out of your way, not because he
+cares too little, but because he cares too much."
+
+Long after a repentant and chastened Leslie had gone to sleep, his
+arm over Nina's unconscious shoulder, Elizabeth stood wide-eyed on
+the tiny balcony outside her room.  From it in daylight she could
+see the Livingstone house.  Now it was invisible, but an upper
+window was outlined in the light.  Very shyly she kissed her finger
+tips to it.
+
+"Good-night, dear," she whispered.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+Louis Bassett had left for Norada the day after David's sudden
+illness, but ten days later found him only as far as Chicago, and
+laid up in his hotel with a sprained knee.  It was not until the
+day Nina went back to the little house in the Ridgely Road, having
+learned the first lesson of married life, that men must not only be
+captured but also held, that he was able to resume his journey.
+
+He had chafed wretchedly under the delay.  It was true that
+nothing in the way of a story had broken yet.  The Tribune had
+carried a photograph of the cabin where Clark had according to the
+Donaldson woman spent the winter following the murder, and there
+were the usual reports that he had been seen recently in spots as
+diverse as Seattle and New Orleans.  But when the following Sunday
+brought nothing further he surmised that the pack, having lost the
+scent, had been called off.
+
+He confirmed this before starting West by visiting some of the
+offices of the leading papers and looking up old friends.  The
+Clark story was dead for the time.  They had run a lot of pictures
+of him, however, and some one might turn him up eventually, but a
+scent was pretty cold in ten years.  The place had changed, too.
+Oil had been discovered five years ago, and the old settlers had,
+a good many of them, cashed in and moved away.  The town had grown
+like all oil towns.
+
+Bassett was fairly content.  He took the night train out of Chicago
+and spent the next day crossing Nebraska, fertile, rich and
+interesting.  On the afternoon of the second day he left the train
+and took a branch line toward the mountains and Norada, and from
+that time on he became an urbane, interested and generally
+cigar-smoking interrogation point.
+
+"Railroad been here long?" he asked the conductor.
+
+"Four years."
+
+"Norada must have been pretty isolated before that."
+
+"Thirty miles in a coach or a Ford car."
+
+"I was reading the other day," said Bassett, "about the Judson
+Clark case.  Have a cigar? Got time to sit down?"
+
+"You a newspaper man?"
+
+"Oil well supplies," said Bassett easily.  "Well, in this article
+it seemed some woman or other had made a confession.  It sounded
+fishy to me."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you about that." The conductor sat down and bit
+off the end of his cigar.  "I knew the Donaldsons well, and Maggie
+Donaldson was an honest woman.  But I'll tell you how I explain the
+thing.  Donaldson died, and that left her pretty much alone.  The
+executors of the Clark estate kept her on the ranch, but when the
+estate was settled three years ago she had to move.  That broke her
+all up.  She's always said he wasn't dead.  She kept the house just
+as it was, and my wife says she had his clothes all ready and
+everything."
+
+"That rather sounds as though the story is true, doesn't it?"
+
+"Not necessarily.  It's my idea she got from hoping to moping, so
+to speak.  She went in to town regular for letters for ten years,
+and the postmaster says she never got any.  She was hurt in front
+of the post office.  The talk around here is that she's been off
+her head for the last year or two."
+
+"But they found the cabin."
+
+"Sure they did," said the conductor equably.  "The cabin was no
+secret.  It was an old fire station before they put the new one on
+Goat Mountain.  I spent a month in it myself, once, with a dude who
+wanted to take pictures of bear.  We found a bear, but it charged
+the camera and I'd be running yet if I hadn't come to civilization."
+
+When he had gone Bassett fell into deep thought.  So Maggie
+Donaldson had gone to the post office for ten years.  He tried to
+visualize those faithful, wearisome journeys, through spring mud
+and winter snow, always futile and always hopeful.  He did not for
+a moment believe that she had "gone off her head." She had been
+faithful to the end, as some women were, and in the end, too, as
+had happened before, her faith had killed her.
+
+And again he wondered at the curious ability of some men to secure
+loyalty.  They might go through life, tearing down ideals and
+destroying illusions to the last, but always there was some
+faithful hand to rebuild, some faithful soul to worship.
+
+He was somewhat daunted at the size and bustling activity of Norada.
+Its streets were paved and well-lighted, there were a park and a
+public library, and the clerk at the Commercial Hotel asked him if
+he wished a private bath!  But the development was helpful in one
+way.  In the old Norada a newcomer might have been subjected to a
+friendly but inquisitive interest.  In this grown-up and
+self-centered community a man might come and go unnoticed.
+
+And he had other advantages.  The pack, as he cynically thought of
+them, would have started at the Clark ranch and the cabin.  He would
+get to them, of course, but he meant to start on the outside of the
+circle and work in.
+
+"Been here long?" he asked the clerk at the desk, after a leisurely
+meal.
+
+The clerk grinned.
+
+"I came here two years ago.  I never saw Jud Clark.  To get to the
+Clark place take the road north out of the town and keep straight
+about eight miles.  The road's good now.  You fellows have worn it
+smooth."
+
+"Must have written that down and learned it off," Bassett said
+admiringly.  "What the devil's the Clark place?  And why should I
+go there?  Unless," he added, "they serve a decent meal."
+
+"Sorry." The clerk looked at him sharply, was satisfied, and picked
+up a pen.  "You'll hear the story if you stay around here any time.
+Anything I can do for you?"
+
+"Yes.  Fire the cook," Bassett said, and moved away.
+
+He spent the evening in going over his notes and outlining a
+campaign, and the next day he stumbled on a bit of luck.  His
+elderly chambermaid had lived in and around the town for years.
+
+"Ever hear of any Livingstones in these parts?" he asked.
+
+"Why, yes.  There used to be a Livingstone ranch at Dry River," she
+said, pausing with her carpet sweeper, and looking at him.  "It
+wasn't much of a place.  Although you can't tell these days.  I
+sold sixty acres eight years ago for two thousand dollars, and the
+folks that bought it are getting a thousand a day out of it."
+
+She sighed.  She had touched the hem of fortune's garment and passed
+on; for some opportunity knocked but faintly, and for others it
+burst open the door and forced its way in.
+
+"I'd be a millionaire now if I'd held on," she said somberly.  That
+day Bassett engaged a car by the day, he to drive it himself and
+return it in good condition, the garage to furnish tires.
+
+"I'd just like to say one thing," the owner said, as he tried the
+gears.  "I don't know where you're going, and it's not exactly my
+business.  Here in the oil country, where they're cutting each
+other's throats for new leases, we let a man alone.  But if you've
+any idea of taking that car by the back road to the old fire station
+where Jud Clark's supposed to have spent the winter, I'll just say
+this: we've had two stuck up there for a week, and the only way I
+see to get them back is a cyclone."
+
+"I'm going to Dry River," Bassett said shortly.
+
+"Dry River's right, if you're looking for oil!  Go easy on the
+brakes, old man.  We need 'em in our business."
+
+Dry River was a small settlement away from the railroad.  It
+consisted of two intersecting unpaved streets, a dozen or so
+houses, a closed and empty saloon and two general stores.  He chose
+one at random and found that the old Livingstone place had been
+sold ten years ago, on the death of its owner, Henry Livingstone.
+
+"His brother from the East inherited it," said the storekeeper.
+"He came and sold out, lock, stock and barrel.  Not that there was
+much.  A few cattle and horses, and the stuff in the ranch house,
+which wasn't valuable.  There were a lot of books, and the brother
+gave them for a library, but we haven't any building.  The railroad
+isn't built this far yet, and unless we get oil here it won't be."
+
+"The brother inherited it, eh?  Do you know the brother's name?"
+
+"David, I think.  He was a doctor back East somewhere."
+
+"Then this Henry Livingstone wasn't married?  Or at least had no
+children?"
+
+"He wasn't married.  He was a sort of hermit.  He'd been dead two
+days before any one knew it.  My wife went out when they found him
+and got him ready for the funeral.  He was buried before the
+brother got here."  He glanced at Bassett shrewdly.  "The place has
+been prospected for oil, and there's a dry hole on the next ranch.
+I tell my wife nature's like the railroad.  It quit before it got
+this far."
+
+Bassett's last scruple had fled.  The story was there, ready for
+the gathering.  So ready, indeed, that he was almost suspicious of
+his luck.
+
+And that conviction, that things were coming too easy, persisted
+through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small
+house behind the store.  She was a talkative woman, eager to
+discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity
+as to the reason for his question.
+
+"Henry Livingstone!" she said.  "Well, I should say so.  I went
+out right away when we got the word he was dead, and there I stayed
+until it was all over.  I guess I know as much about him as any one
+around here does, for I had to go over his papers to find out who
+his people were."
+
+The papers, it seemed, had not been very interesting; canceled
+checks and receipted bills, and a large bundle of letters, all of
+them from a brother named David and a sister who signed herself Lucy.
+There had been a sealed one, too, addressed to David Livingstone,
+and to be opened after his death.  She had had her husband wire
+to "David" and he had come out, too late for the funeral.
+
+"Do you remember when that was?"
+
+"Let me see.  Henry Livingstone died about a month before the murder
+at the Clark ranch.  We date most things around here from that time."
+
+"How long did 'David' stay?" Bassett had tried to keep his tone
+carefully conversational, but he saw that it was not necessary.
+She was glad of a chance to talk.
+
+"Well, I'd say about three or four weeks.  He hadn't seen his brother
+for years, and I guess there was no love lost.  He sold everything
+as quick as he could, and went back East."  She glanced at the clock.
+"My husband will be in soon for dinner.  I'd be glad to have you stay
+and take a meal with us."
+
+The reporter thanked her and declined.
+
+"It's an interesting story," he said.  "I didn't tell your husband,
+for I wasn't sure I was on the right trail.  But the David and Lucy
+business eliminates this man.  There's a piece of property waiting
+in the East for a Henry Livingstone who came to this state in the
+80's, or for his heirs.  You can say positively that this man was
+not married?"
+
+"No.  He didn't like women.  Never had one on the place.  Two ranch
+hands that are still at the Wassons' and himself, that was all.
+The Wassons are the folks who bought the ranch."
+
+No housekeeper then, and no son born out of wedlock, so far as any
+evidence went.  All that glib lying in the doctor's office, all that
+apparent openness and frankness, gone by the board!  The man in the
+cabin, reported by Maggie Donaldson, had been David Livingstone.
+Somehow, some way, he had got Judson Clark out of the country and
+spirited him East.  Not that the how mattered just yet.  The
+essential fact was there, that David Livingstone had been in this
+part of the country at the time Maggie Donaldson had been nursing
+Judson Clark in the mountains.
+
+Bassett sat back and chewed the end of his cigar thoughtfully.  The
+sheer boldness of the scheme which had saved Judson Clark compelled
+his admiration, but the failure to cover the trail, the ease with
+which he had picked it up, made him suspicious.
+
+He rose and threw away his cigar.
+
+"You say this David went East, when he had sold out the place.  Do
+you remember where he lived?"
+
+"Some town in eastern Pennsylvania.  I've forgotten the name."
+
+"I've got to be sure I'm wrong, and then go ahead," he said, as he
+got his hat.  "I'll see those men at the ranch, I guess, and then
+be on my way.  How far is it?"
+
+It was about ten miles, along a bad road which kept him too much
+occupied for any connected thought.  But his sense of exultation
+persisted.  He had found Judson Clark.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Dick's decision to cut himself off from Elizabeth was born of his
+certainty that he could not see her and keep his head.  He was
+resolutely determined to keep his head, until he knew what he had
+to offer her.  But he was very unhappy.  He worked sturdily all
+day and slept at night out of sheer fatigue, only to rouse in the
+early morning to a conviction of something wrong before he was
+fully awake.  Then would come the uncertainty and pain of full
+consciousness, and he would lie with his arms under his head, gazing
+unblinkingly at the ceiling and preparing to face another day.
+
+There was no prospect of early relief, although David had not again
+referred to his going away.  David was very feeble.  The look of him
+sometimes sent an almost physical pain through Dick's heart.  But
+there were times when he roused to something like his old spirit,
+shouted for tobacco, frowned over his diet tray, and fought Harrison
+Miller when he came in to play cribbage in much his old tumultuous
+manner.
+
+Then, one afternoon late in May, when for four days Dick had not
+seen Elizabeth, suddenly he found the decision as to their relation
+taken out of his hands, and by Elizabeth herself.
+
+He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the
+waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate.  He
+could not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his
+dismay, was distinctly husky.
+
+"Is anything wrong?" he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.
+
+"That's what I want to know, Dick."
+
+Suddenly he found himself violently angry.  Not at her, of course.
+At everything.
+
+"Wrong?" he said, savagely.  "Yes.  Everything is wrong!"
+
+Then he was angry! She went rather pale.
+
+"What have I done, Dick?"
+
+As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed.
+Startled, too.
+
+"You?" he said.  "What have you done? You're the only thing that's
+right in a wrong world.  You--"
+
+He checked himself, put down his bag--he had just come in--and
+closed the door into the hall.  Then he stood at a safe distance
+from her, and folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head
+-which shows how strange the English language is.
+
+"Elizabeth," he said gravely.  "I've been a self-centered fool.  I
+stayed away because I've been in trouble.  I'm still in trouble,
+for that matter.  But it hasn't anything to do with you.  Not
+directly, anyhow."
+
+"Don't you think it's possible that I know what it is?"
+
+"You do know."
+
+He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the
+brooding maternity born of a profound passion.  To Elizabeth just
+then he was not a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and
+death, but a worried boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.
+
+"There is always gossip," she said, "and the only thing one can do
+is to forget it at once.  You ought to be too big for that sort of
+thing."
+
+"But--suppose it is true?"
+
+"What difference would it make?"
+
+He made a quick movement toward her.
+
+"There may be more than that.  I don't know, Elizabeth,"  he said,
+his eyes on hers.  "I have always thought--I can't go to David
+now."
+
+He was moved to go on.  To tell her of his lost youth, of that
+strange trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years.
+But he could not.  He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal
+in her eyes, precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct
+which had made him inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was
+too brilliant.  But greater than that was his new fear that
+something neither happy nor right lay behind him under lock and key
+in his memory.
+
+"I want you to know this, Dick," she said.  "That nothing, no gossip
+or anything, can make any difference to me.  And I've been terribly
+hurt.  We've been such friends.  You--I've been lying awake at
+night, worrying."
+
+That went to his heart first, and then to his head.  This might be
+all, all he was ever to have.  This hour, and this precious and
+tender child, so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct;
+all his world in that imitation mahogany chair.
+
+"You're all I've got," he said.  "The one real thing in a world
+that's going to smash.  I think I love you more than God."
+
+The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of
+refusing to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days.  He was
+incredibly happy.
+
+He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness,
+for long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though
+nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long
+lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled
+prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure.  Not that Dick
+himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered
+that the expectation of relief was half the battle.  But that was
+the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and
+did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation
+of Doctor Richard Livingstone.  But hidden away was a heart that
+behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang and dreamed,
+and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the street,
+and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the vagus
+and accelerator nerves.  Which are all any doctor really knows about
+the heart, until he falls in love.
+
+He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something
+that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's
+essential rectitude helped him.  David could not do a wrong thing,
+or an unworthy one.  He wished he were more like David.
+
+The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth.  Sometimes, in
+his room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what
+she could see in him to care about.  He shaved twice a day now, and
+his face was so sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to
+his secret humiliation.  When he was dressed in the morning he found
+himself once or twice taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at
+those times he wished very earnestly that he had some outstanding
+quality of appearance that she might admire.
+
+He refused to think.  He was content for a time simply to feel, to
+be supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look
+ahead.  And the old house seemed to brighten with him.  Never had
+Lucy's window boxes been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the
+sun poured into David's sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling
+white in her uniform that David declared he was suffering from
+snow-blindness.
+
+And David himself was improving rapidly.  With the passage of each
+day he felt more secure.  The reporter from the Times-Republican
+--if he were really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see
+him, would have told him the story.  No.  That bridge was safely
+crossed.  And Dick was happy.  David, lying in his bed, would listen
+and smile faintly when Dick came whistling into the house or leaped
+up the stairs two at a time; when he sang in his shower, or
+tormented the nurse with high-spirited nonsense.  The boy was very
+happy.  He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and things would be as
+they should be; there would be the fullness of life, young voices
+in the house, toys on the lawn.  He himself would pass on, in the
+fullness of time, but Dick--
+
+On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony
+of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with
+a blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box.  Unwrapping
+it he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that
+still another.
+
+"What fol-de-rol is all this?" David demanded fiercely, with a
+childish look of expectation in his eyes.  "Give me that box.
+Some more slippers, probably!"
+
+He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the
+mass.  It was a cigar!
+
+It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed
+him into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started
+for his late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.
+
+"Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs," she said.  "I told her you wanted
+to see her.  She's brought some chicken jelly, too."
+
+She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the
+room a critical survey.  She often felt that the nurse was not as
+tidy as she might be.  Then she went over to him and put a hand on
+his shoulder.
+
+"I don't want to worry you, David.  Not now.  But if he's going to
+marry her--"
+
+"Well, why shouldn't he?" he demanded truculently.  "A good woman
+would be one more anchor to windward."
+
+She found that she could not go on.  David was always
+incomprehensible to her when it came to Dick.  Had been
+incomprehensible from the first.  But she could not proceed without
+telling him that the village knew something, and what that
+something was; that already she felt a change in the local attitude
+toward Dick.  He was, for one thing, not quite so busy as he had been.
+
+She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.
+
+In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that
+pertained to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people.
+She had an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked
+by them and wanted by them.  Not that there could be any words,
+because both she and Dick were content just then with love, and
+were holding it very secret between them.
+
+"Well, well!" said David.  "And here we are reversed and I'm the
+patient and you're the doctor!  And good medicine you are, my dear."
+
+He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too.  She
+was a small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes
+that, out of his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed
+for Dick.  She was even more than that.  If Lucy was right, from
+now on she was a part of that experiment in a human soul which he
+had begun with only a professional interest, but which had ended
+by becoming a vital part of his own life.
+
+She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous,
+yet radiantly happy.  The combination of these mixed emotions, plus
+her best sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first.  But
+soon she was telling him the small news of the village, although
+David rather suspected her of listening for Dick's car all the while.
+When she got up to go and held out her hand he kept it, between
+both of his.
+
+"I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing,
+my dear," he said.  "And it seems to me somebody is very happy."
+
+"I am, Doctor David."
+
+He patted her hand.
+
+"Mind you," he said, "I don't know anything and I'm not asking any
+questions.  But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had
+come to me and said, 'Who is the best wife for--well, for a young
+man who is an important part of this community?' I'd have said in
+reply, 'Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who--'"
+
+Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.
+
+"Oh, do you think so?" she asked, breathlessly.  "I love him so
+much, Doctor David.  And I feel so unworthy."
+
+"So you are," he said.  "So's he.  So are all of us, when it comes
+to a great love, child.  That is, we are never quite what the other
+fellow thinks we are.  It's when we don't allow for what the
+scientist folk call a margin of error that we come our croppers.
+I wonder"--he watched her closely--"if you young people ever
+allow for a margin of error?"
+
+"I only know this," she said steadily.  "I can't imagine ever
+caring any less.  I've never thought about myself very much, but I
+do know that.  You see, I think I've cared for a long time."
+
+When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and
+thinking.  Yes.  She would stick.  She had loyalty, loyalty and
+patience and a rare humility.  It was up to Dick then.  And again
+he faced the possibility of an opening door into the past, of
+crowding memories, of confusion and despair and even actual danger.
+And out of that, what?
+
+Habit.  That was all he had to depend on.  The brain was a thing
+of habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could
+evil.  As a man thought, so he was.  For all of his childhood, and
+for the last ten years, Dick's mental habits had been right; his
+environment had been love, his teaching responsibility.  Even if
+the door opened, then, there was only the evil thinking of two or
+three reckless years to combat, and the door might never open.
+Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it closed, and Dick was happy.
+
+When at five o'clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was
+asleep in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly.
+Hearing Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs,
+her finger to her lips.
+
+Dick nodded and went into the office.  The afternoon mail was lying
+there, and he began mechanically to open it.  His thoughts were
+elsewhere.
+
+Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to
+take, certain things, such as Clare Rossiter's story, David's
+uneasiness, his own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor
+even Elizabeth and himself.  They had become of vital importance
+to her family.
+
+There was no evading the issue.  What had once been only his own
+misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital
+importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people.  He
+would have to put his situation clearly before them and let them
+judge.  And he would have to clarify that situation for them and
+for himself.
+
+He had had a weak moment or two.  He knew that some men, many men,
+went to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the
+slate clean and begin again.  He had a man's understanding of
+such concealments.  But he did not for a moment compare his
+situation with theirs, even when the temptation to seize his
+happiness was strongest.  No mere misconduct, but something hidden
+and perhaps terrible lay behind David's strange new attitude.
+Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to analyze
+with professional detachment.  The mind in such cases set up its
+defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but
+against the unbearable.
+
+For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must
+he use every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival
+threatened with cruelty and finality to separate him from the
+present.
+
+With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the
+office.  This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it.
+He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to
+drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth.
+And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the
+believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.
+
+He shook himself and began to read the letter.
+
+"Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are
+laid up.  Burn this as soon as you've read it.  Louis Bassett has
+started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we
+discussed out of town as soon as possible.  Bassett is up to
+mischief.  I'm not signing this fully, for obvious reasons.  G."
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather
+low white house on Italian lines.  In summer, until the family
+exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out
+over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the
+family was "in residence."  Originally designed as a summer home,
+Mrs. Sayre now used it the year round.  There was nothing there,
+as there was in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days
+before her widowhood.
+
+She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no
+taste whatever in her clothing.
+
+"I never know," said Harrison Miller, "when I look up at the Sayre
+place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning."
+
+She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in
+the main, tolerant and maternal.  She liked young people, gave gay
+little parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all
+colors and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and
+was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled
+down.  Between her son and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative
+affection.  She viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion
+about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about him.  She
+had no idea that she knew all that he did with his time, and no
+desire to penetrate the veil of his private life.
+
+"He spends a great deal of money," she said one day to her lawyer.
+"I suppose in the usual ways.  But he is not quite like his father.
+He has real affections, which his father hadn't.  If he marries the
+right girl she can make him almost anything."
+
+She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth
+Wheeler one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace
+had ordered certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house.  She
+was angry at first, for the roses were being saved for a dinner
+party.  Then she considered.
+
+"Very well, Phelps," she said.  "Do it.  And I'll select a plant
+also, to go to Mrs. Wheeler."
+
+After all, why not the Wheeler girl?  She had been carefully reared,
+if the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle
+little thing; very attractive, too, especially in church.  And
+certainly Wallie had been seeing a great deal of her.
+
+She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the
+rooms that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time
+came.  She was more content than she had been for a long time.  She
+was a lonely woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the
+neighborliness she craved; when she wanted society she had to ask
+for it, by invitation.  Standing inside the door of the boudoir,
+her thoughts already at work on draperies and furniture, she had a
+vague dream of new young life stirring in the big house, of no more
+lonely evenings, of the bustle and activity of a family again.
+
+She wanted Wallie to settle down.  She was tired of paying his
+bills at his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the
+days he lay in bed all morning while his valet concocted various
+things to enable him to pull himself together.  He had been four
+years sowing his wild oats, and now at twenty-five she felt he
+should be through with them.
+
+The south room could be the nursery.
+
+On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the
+community, sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a
+chilly hour there while services were read and taps sounded over
+the graves of those who had died in three wars.  She felt very
+grateful that Wallie had come back safely, and that if only now he
+would marry and settle down all would be well.
+
+The service left her emotionally untouched.  She was one of those
+women who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction
+on herself and her affairs.  She had taken the German deluge as a
+personal affliction.  And she stood only stoically enduring while
+the village soprano sang "The Star Spangled Banner."  By the end
+of the service she had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer
+to her problem.
+
+Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club,
+but she found him evasive and not particularly happy.
+
+"You're twenty-five, you know," she said, toward the end of a
+discussion.  "By thirty you'll be too set in your habits, too hard
+to please."
+
+"I'm not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother."
+
+"Of course not.  But you have a good bit of money.  You'll have
+much more when I'm gone.  And money carries responsibility with it."
+
+He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.
+
+"It takes two to make a marriage, mother."
+
+He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.
+
+At three o'clock that afternoon the Sayre limousine stopped in front
+of Nina's house, and Mrs. Sayre, in brilliant pink and a purple hat,
+got out.  Leslie, lounging in a window, made the announcement.
+
+"Here's the Queen of Sheba," he said.  "I'll go upstairs and have a
+headache, if you don't mind."
+
+He kissed Nina and departed hastily.  He was feeling extremely
+gentle toward Nina those days and rather smugly virtuous.  He
+considered that his conscience had brought him back and not a very
+bad fright, which was the fact, and he fairly exuded righteousness.
+
+It was the great lady's first call, and Nina was considerably
+uplifted.  It was for such moments as this one trained servants
+and put Irish lace on their aprons, and had decorators who stood
+off with their heads a little awry and devised backgrounds for
+one's personality.
+
+"What a delightful room!" said Mrs. Sayre.  "And how do you keep
+a maid as trim as that?"
+
+"I must have service," Nina replied.  "The butler's marching in a
+parade or something.  How nice of you to come and see our little
+place.  It's a band-box, of course."
+
+Mrs.  Sayre sat down, a gross disharmony in the room, but a solid
+and not unkindly woman for all that.
+
+"My dear," she said, "I am not paying a call.  Or not only that.  I
+came to talk to you about something.  About Wallace and your sister."
+
+Nina was gratified and not a little triumphant.
+
+"I see," she said.  "Do you mean that they are fond of one another?"
+
+"Wallace is.  Of course, this talk is between ourselves, but--I'm
+going to be frank, Nina.  I want Wallie to marry, and I want him to
+marry soon.  You and I know that the life of an unattached man about
+town is full of temptations.  I want him to settle down.  I'm lonely,
+too, but that's not so important."
+
+Nina hesitated.
+
+"I don't know about Elizabeth.  She's fond of Wallie, as who isn't?
+But lately--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Well, for the last few days I have been wondering.  She doesn't
+talk, you know.  But she has been seeing something of Dick
+Livingstone."
+
+"Doctor Livingstone! She'd be throwing herself away!"
+
+"Yes, but she's like that.  I mean, she isn't ambitious.  We've
+always expected her to throw herself away; at least I have."
+
+A half hour later Leslie, upstairs, leaned over the railing to see
+if there were any indications of departure.  The door was open, and
+Mrs.  Sayre evidently about to take her leave.  She was saying:
+
+"It's very close to my heart, Nina dear, and I know you will be
+tactful.  I haven't stressed the material advantages, but you might
+point them out to her."
+
+A few moments later Leslie came downstairs.  Nina was sitting alone,
+thinking, with a not entirely pleasant look of calculation on her face.
+
+"Well?" he said.  "What were you two plotting?"
+
+"Plotting? Nothing, of course."
+
+He looked down at her.  "Now see here, old girl," he said, "you
+keep your hands off Elizabeth's affairs.  If I know anything she's
+making a damn good choice, and don't you forget it."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+Dick stood with the letter in his hand, staring at it.  Who was
+Bassett?  Who was "G"?  What had the departure of whoever Bassett
+might be for Norada to do with David?  And who was the person who
+was to be got out of town?
+
+He did not go upstairs.  He took the letter into his private office,
+closed the door, and sitting down at his desk turned his reading
+lamp on it, as though that physical act might bring some mental light.
+
+Reread, the cryptic sentences began to take on meaning.  An unknown
+named Bassett, whoever he might be, was going to Norada bent on
+"mischief," and another unknown who signed himself "G" was warning
+David of that fact.  But the mischief was designed, not against
+David, but against a third unknown, some one who was to be got out
+of town.
+
+David had been trying to get him out of town.--The warning referred
+to himself.
+
+His first impulse was to go to David, and months later he was to
+wonder what would have happened had he done so.  How far could
+Bassett have gone?  What would have been his own decision when he
+learned the truth?
+
+For a little while, then, the shuttle was in Dick's own hand.  He
+went up to David's room, and with his hand on the letter in his
+pocket, carried on behind his casual talk the debate that was so
+vital.  But David had a headache and a slightly faster pulse, and
+that portion of the pattern was never woven.
+
+The association between anxiety and David's illness had always been
+apparent in Dick's mind, but now he began to surmise a concrete
+shock, a person, a telegram, or a telephone call.  And after dinner
+that night he went back to the kitchen.
+
+"Minnie," he inquired, "do you remember the afternoon Doctor David
+was taken sick?"
+
+"I'll never forget it."
+
+"Did he receive a telegram that day?"
+
+"Not that I know of.  He often answers the bell himself."
+
+"Do you know whether he had a visitor, just before you heard him
+fall?"
+
+"He had a patient, yes.  A man."
+
+"Who was it?"
+
+"I don't know.  He was a stranger to me."
+
+"Do you remember what he looked like?"
+
+Minnie reflected.
+
+"He was a smallish man, maybe thirty-five or so," she said.  "I think
+he had gaiters over his shoes, or maybe light tops.  He was a nice
+appearing person."
+
+"How soon after that did you hear Doctor David fall?"
+
+"Right away.  First the door slammed, and then he dropped."
+
+Poor old David! Dick had not the slightest doubt now that David had
+received some unfortunate news, and that up there in his bedroom
+ever since, alone and helpless, he had been struggling with some
+secret dread he could not share with any one.  Not even with Lucy,
+probably.
+
+Nevertheless, Dick made a try with Lucy that evening.
+
+"Aunt Lucy," he said, "do you know of anything that could have
+caused David's collapse?"
+
+"What sort of thing?" she asked guardedly.
+
+"A letter, we'll say, or a visitor?"
+
+When he saw that she was only puzzled and thinking back, he knew
+she could not help him.
+
+"Never mind," he said.  "I was feeling about for some cause.
+That's all."
+
+He was satisfied that Lucy knew no more than he did of David's
+visitor, and that David had kept his own counsel ever since.  But
+the sense of impending disaster that had come with the letter did
+not leave him.  He went through his evening office hours almost
+mechanically, with a part of his mind busy on the puzzle.  How did
+it affect the course of action he had marked out? Wasn't it even
+more necessary than ever now to go to Walter Wheeler and tell him
+how things stood?  He hated mystery.  He liked to walk in the
+middle of the road in the sunlight.  But even stronger than that
+was a growing feeling that he needed a sane and normal judgment on
+his situation; a fresh viewpoint and some unprejudiced advice.
+
+He visited David before he left, and he was very gentle with him.
+In view of this new development he saw David from a different angle,
+facing and dreading something imminent, and it came to him with a
+shock that he might have to clear things up to save David.  The
+burden, whatever it was, was breaking him.
+
+He had telephoned, and Mr. Wheeler was waiting for him.  Walter
+Wheeler thought he knew what was coming, and he had well in mind
+what he was going to say.  He had thought it over, pacing the floor
+alone, with the dog at his heels.  He would say:
+
+"I like and respect you, Livingstone.  If you're worrying about what
+these damned gossips say, let's call it a day and forget it.  I
+know a man when I see one, and if it's all right with Elizabeth
+it's all right with me."
+
+Things, however, did not turn out just that way.  Dick came in,
+grave and clearly preoccupied, and the first thing he said was:
+
+"I have a story to tell you, Mr. Wheeler.  After you've heard it,
+and given me your opinion on it, I'll come to a matter that--well,
+that I can't talk about now."
+
+"If it's the silly talk that I daresay you've heard--"
+
+"No.  I don't give a damn for talk.  But there is something else.
+Something I haven't told Elizabeth, and that I'll have to tell you."
+
+Walter Wheeler drew himself up rather stiffly.  Leslie's defection
+was still in his mind.
+
+"Don't tell me you're tangled up with another woman."
+
+"No.  At least I think not.  I don't know."
+
+It is doubtful if Walter Wheeler grasped many of the technicalities
+that followed.  Dick talked and he listened, nodding now and then,
+and endeavoring very hard to get the gist of the matter.  It seemed
+to him curious rather than serious.  Certainly the mind was a
+strange thing.  He must read up on it.  Now and then he stopped
+Dick with a question, and Dick would break in on his narrative to
+reply.  Thus, once:
+
+"You've said nothing to Elizabeth at all? About the walling off,
+as you call it?"
+
+"No.  At first I was simply ashamed of it.  I didn't want her to
+get the idea that I wasn't normal."
+
+"I see."
+
+"Now, as I tell you, I begin to think-- I've told you that this
+walling off is an unconscious desire to forget something too
+painful to remember.  It's practically always that.  I can't go to
+her with just that, can I? I've got to know first what it is."
+
+"I'd begun to think there was an understanding between you."
+
+Dick faced him squarely.
+
+"There is.  I didn't intend it.  In fact, I was trying to keep away
+from her.  I didn't mean to speak to her until I'd cleared things
+up.  But it happened anyhow; I suppose the way those things always
+happen."
+
+It was Walter Wheeler's own decision, finally, that he go to
+Norada with Dick as soon as David could be safely left.  It was the
+letter which influenced him.  Up to that he had viewed the
+situation with a certain detachment; now he saw that it threatened
+the peace of two households.
+
+"It's a warning, all right."
+
+"Yes.  Undoubtedly."
+
+"You don't recognize the name Bassett?"
+
+"No.  I've tried, of course."
+
+The result of some indecision was finally that Elizabeth should not
+be told anything until they were ready to tell it all.  And in the
+end a certain resentment that she had become involved in an unhappy
+situation died in Walter Wheeler before Dick's white face and
+sunken eyes.
+
+At ten o'clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter
+Wheeler got up and went out into the hall.
+
+"Go on upstairs, Margaret," he said to his wife.  "I've got a
+visitor." He did not look at Elizabeth.  "You settle down and be
+comfortable," he added, "and I'll be up before long.  Where's Jim?"
+
+"I don't know.  He didn't go to Nina's."
+
+"He started with you, didn't he?"
+
+"Yes.  But he left us at the corner."
+
+They exchanged glances.  Jim had been worrying them lately.  Strange
+how a man could go along for years, his only worries those of
+business, his track a single one through comfortable fields where
+he reaped only what he sowed.  And then his family grew up, and
+involved him without warning in new perplexities and new troubles.
+Nina first, then Jim, and now this strange story which so inevitably
+involved Elizabeth.
+
+He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.
+
+"Don't worry about Jim, mother," he said.  "He's all right
+fundamentally.  He's going through the bad time between being a boy
+and being a man.  He's a good boy."
+
+He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender and solicitous.
+To him she was just "mother."  He had never thought of another woman
+in all their twenty-four years together.
+
+Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.
+
+"Is it Dick?" she asked in a low tone.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You don't mind, daddy, do you?"
+
+"I only want you to be happy," he said rather hoarsely.  "You know
+that, don't you?"
+
+She nodded, and turned up her face to be kissed.  He knew that she
+had no doubt whatever that this interview was to seal her to Dick
+Livingstone for ever and ever.  She fairly radiated happiness and
+confidence.  He left her standing there going back to the
+living-room closed the door.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+Louis Bassett, when he started to the old Livingstone ranch, now
+the Wasson place, was carefully turning over in his mind David's
+participation in the escape of Judson Clark.  Certain phases of it
+were quite clear, provided one accepted the fact that, following a
+heavy snowfall, an Easterner and a tenderfoot had gone into the
+mountains alone, under conditions which had caused the posse after
+Judson Clark to turn back and give him up for dead.
+
+Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical man?  If he
+had, would Maggie Donaldson not have said so?  She had said "a man
+outside that she had at first thought was a member of the searching
+party."  Evidently, then, Donaldson had not prepared her to expect
+medical assistance.
+
+Take the other angle.  Say David Livingstone had not been sent for.
+Say he knew nothing of the cabin or its occupants until he stumbled
+on them.  He had sold the ranch, distributed his brother's books,
+and apparently the townspeople at Dry River believed that he had
+gone back home.  Then what had taken him, clearly alone and having
+certainly given the impression of a departure for the East, into
+the mountains?  To hunt?  To hunt what, that he went about it
+secretly and alone?
+
+Bassett was inclined to the Donaldson theory, finally.  John
+Donaldson would have been wanting a doctor, and not wanting one
+from Norada.  He might have heard of this Eastern medical man at
+Dry River, have gone to him with his story, even have taken him
+part of the way.  The situation was one that would have a certain
+appeal.  It was possible, anyhow:
+
+But instead of clarifying the situation Bassett's visit at the
+Wasson place brought forward new elements which fitted neither of
+the hypotheses in his mind.
+
+To Wasson himself, whom he met on horseback on the road into the
+ranch, he gave the same explanation he had given to the store-keeper's
+wife.  Wasson was a tall man in chaps and a Stetson, and he was
+courteously interested.
+
+"Bill and Jake are still here," he said.  "They're probably in for
+dinner now, and I'll see you get a chance to talk to them.  I took
+them over with the ranch.  Property, you say?  Well, I hope it's
+better land than he had here."
+
+He turned his horse and rode beside the car to the house.
+
+"Comes a little late to do Henry Livingstone much good," he said.
+"He's been lying in the Dry River graveyard for about ten years.
+Not much mourned either.  He was about as close-mouthed and
+uncompanionable as they make them."
+
+The description Wasson had applied to Henry Livingstone, Bassett
+himself applied to the two ranch hands later on, during their
+interview.  It could hardly have been called an interview at all,
+indeed, and after a time Bassett realized that behind their
+taciturnity was suspicion.  They were watching him, undoubtedly;
+he rather thought, when he looked away, that once or twice they
+exchanged glances.  He was certain, too, that Wasson himself was
+puzzled.
+
+"Speak up, Jake," he said once, irritably.  "This gentleman has
+come a long way.  It's a matter of some property."
+
+"What sort of property?" Jake demanded.  Jake was the spokesman of
+the two.
+
+"That's not important," Bassett observed, easily.  "What we want to
+know is if Henry Livingstone had any family."
+
+"He had a brother."
+
+"No one else?"
+
+"Then it's up to me to trail the brother," Bassett observed.
+"Either of you remember where he lived?"
+
+"Somewhere in the East."
+
+Bassett laughed.
+
+"That's a trifle vague," he commented good-humoredly.  "Didn't you
+boys ever mail any letters for him?"
+
+He was certain again that they exchanged glances, but they
+continued to present an unbroken front of ignorance.  Wasson was
+divided between irritation and amusement.
+
+"What'd I tell you?" he asked.  "Like master like man.  I've been
+here ten years, and I've never got a word about the Livingstones
+out of either of them."
+
+"I'm a patient man." Bassett grinned.  "I suppose you'll admit that
+one of you drove David Livingstone to the train, and that you had a
+fair idea then of where he was going?"
+
+He looked directly at Jake, but Jake's face was a solid mask.  He
+made no reply whatever.
+
+From that moment on Bassett was certain that David had not been
+driven away from the ranch at all.  What he did not know, and was
+in no way to find out, was whether the two ranch hands knew that
+he had gone into the mountains, or why.  He surmised back of their
+taciturnity a small mystery of their own, and perhaps a fear.
+Possibly David's going was as much a puzzle to them as to him.
+Conceivably, during the hours together on the range, or during the
+winter snows, for ten years they had wrangled and argued over a
+disappearance as mysterious in its way as Judson Clark's.
+
+He gave up at last, having learned certain unimportant facts: that
+the recluse had led a lonely life; that he had never tried to make
+the place more than carry itself; that he was a student, and that
+he had no other peculiarities.
+
+"Did he ever say anything that would lead you to believe that he had
+any family, outside of his brother and sister?  That is, any direct
+heir?" Bassett asked.
+
+"He never talked about himself," said Jake.  "If that's all, Mr.
+Wasson, I've got a steer bogged down in the north pasture and I'll
+be going."
+
+On the Wassons' invitation he remained to lunch, and when the ranch
+owner excused himself and rode away after the meal he sat for some
+time on the verandah, with Mrs. Wasson sewing and his own eyes fixed
+speculatively on the mountain range, close, bleak and mysterious.
+
+"Strange thing," he commented.  "Here's a man, a book-lover and
+student, who comes out here, not to make living and be a useful
+member of the community, but apparently to bury himself alive.
+I wonder, why."
+
+"A great many come out here to get away from something, Mr. Bassett."
+
+"Yes, to start again.  But this man never started again.  He
+apparently just quit."
+
+Mrs. Wasson put down her sewing and looked at him thoughtfully.
+
+"Did the boys tell you anything about the young man who visited
+Henry Livingstone now and then?"
+
+"No.  They were not very communicative."
+
+"I suppose they wouldn't tell.  Yet I don't see, unless--"  She
+stopped, lost in some field of speculation where he could not follow
+her.  "You know, we haven't much excitement here, and when this boy
+was first seen around the place--he was here mostly in the summer
+--we decided that he was a relative.  I don't know why we considered
+him mysterious, unless it was because he was hardly ever seen.  I
+don't even know that that was deliberate.  For that matter Mr.
+Livingstone wasn't much more than a name to us."
+
+"You mean, a son?"
+
+"Nobody knew.  He was here only now and then."
+
+Bassett moved in his chair and looked at her.
+
+"How old do you suppose this boy was?" he asked.
+
+"He was here at different times.  When Mr.  Livingstone died I
+suppose he was in his twenties.  The thing that makes it seem odd
+to me is that the men didn't mention him to you."
+
+"I didn't ask about him, of course."
+
+She went on with her sewing, apparently intending to drop the
+matter; but the reporter felt that now and then she was subjecting
+him to a sharp scrutiny, and that, in some shrewd woman-fashion,
+she was trying to place him.
+
+"You said it was a matter of some property?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But it's rather late, isn't it?  Ten years?"
+
+"That's what makes it difficult."
+
+There was another silence, during which she evidently made her
+decision.
+
+"I have never said this before, except to Mr. Wasson.  But I believe
+he was here when Henry Livingstone died."
+
+Her tone was mysterious, and Bassett stared at her.
+
+"You don't think Livingstone was murdered!"
+
+"No.  He died of heart failure.  There was an autopsy.  But he had
+a bad cut on his head.  Of course, he may have fallen--Bill and
+Jake were away.  They'd driven some cattle out on the range.  It
+was two days before he was found, and it would have been longer if
+Mr.  Wasson hadn't ridden out to talk to him about buying.  He found
+him dead in his bed, but there was blood on the floor in the next
+room.  I washed it up myself."
+
+"Of course," she added, when Bassett maintained a puzzled silence,
+"I may be all wrong.  He might have fallen in the next room and
+dragged himself to bed.  But he was very neatly covered up."
+
+"It's your idea, then, that this boy put him into the bed?"
+
+"I don't know.  He wasn't seen about the place.  He's never been
+here since.  But the posse found a horse with the Livingstone
+brand, saddled, dead in Dry River Canyon when it was looking for
+Judson Clark.  Of course, that was a month later.  The men here,
+Bill and Jake, claimed it had wandered off, but I've often wondered."
+
+After a time Bassett got up and took his leave.  He was confused
+and irritated.  Here, whether creditably or not, was Dick
+Livingstone accounted for.  There was a story there, probably, but
+not the story he was after.  This unknown had been at the ranch
+when Henry Livingstone died, had perhaps been indirectly responsible
+for his death.  He had, witness the horse, fled after the thing
+happened.  Later on, then, David Livingstone had taken him into his
+family.  That was all.
+
+Except for that identification of Gregory's, and for the photograph
+of Judson Clark....  For a moment he wondered if the two, Jud Clark
+and the unknown, could be the same.  But Dry River would have known
+Clark.  That couldn't be.
+
+He almost ditched the car on his way back to Norada, so deeply was
+he engrossed in thought.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+On the seventh of June David and Lucy went to the seashore, went
+by the order of various professional gentlemen who had differed
+violently during the course of David's illness, but who now suddenly
+agreed with an almost startling unanimity.  Which unanimity was the
+result of careful coaching by Dick.
+
+He saw in David's absence his only possible chance to go back to
+Norada without worry to the sick man, and he felt, too, that a
+change, getting away from the surcharged atmosphere of the old
+house, would be good for both David and Lucy.
+
+For days before they started Lucy went about in a frenzy of nervous
+energy, writing out menus for Minnie for a month ahead, counting
+and recounting David's collars and handkerchiefs, cleaning and
+pressing his neckties.  In the harness room in the stable Mike
+polished boots until his arms ached, and at the last moment with
+trunks already bulging, came three gift dressing-gowns for David,
+none of which he would leave behind.
+
+"I declare," Lucy protested to Dick, "I don't know what's come over
+him.  Every present he's had since he was sick he's taking along.
+You'd think he was going to be shut up on a desert island."
+
+But Dick thought he understood.  In David's life his friends had
+had to take the place of wife and children; he clung to them now,
+in his age and weakness, and Dick knew that he had a sense of
+deserting them, of abandoning them after many faithful years.
+
+So David carried with him the calendars and slippers, dressing-gowns
+and bed-socks which were at once the tangible evidence of their
+friendliness and Lucy's despair.
+
+Watching him, Dick was certain nothing further had come to
+threaten his recovery.  Dick carefully inspected the mail, but no
+suspicious letter had arrived, and as the days went on David's peace
+seemed finally re-established.  He made no more references to Johns
+Hopkins, slept like a child, and railed almost pettishly at his
+restricted diet.
+
+"When we get away from Dick, Lucy," he would say, "we'll have beef
+again, and roast pork and sausage."
+
+Lucy would smile absently and shake her head.
+
+"You'll stick to your diet, David," she would say.  "David, it's
+the strangest thing about your winter underwear.  I'm sure you had
+five suits, and now there are only three."
+
+Or it was socks she missed, or night-clothing.  And David, inwardly
+chuckling, would wonder with her, knowing all the while that they
+had clothed some needy body.
+
+On the night before the departure David went out for his first short
+walk alone, and brought Elizabeth back with him.
+
+"I found a rose walking up the street, Lucy," he bellowed up the
+stairs, "and I brought it home for the dinner table."
+
+Lucy came down, flushed from her final effort over the trunks, but
+gently hospitable.
+
+"It's fish night, Elizabeth," she said.  "You know Minnie's a
+Catholic, so we always have fish on Friday.  I hope you eat it."
+She put her hand on Elizabeth's arm and gently patted it, and thus
+was Elizabeth taken into the old brick house as one of its own.
+
+Elizabeth was finding this period of her tacit engagement rather
+puzzling.  Her people puzzled her.  Even Dick did, at times.  And
+nobody seemed anxious to make plans for the future, or even to
+discuss the wedding.  She was a little hurt about that, remembering
+the excitement over Nina's.
+
+But what chiefly bewildered her was the seeming necessity for
+secrecy.  Even Nina had not been told, nor Jim.  She did not resent
+that, although it bewildered her.  Her own inclination was to shout
+it from the house-tops.  Her father had simply said: "I've told your
+mother, honey, and we'd better let it go at that, for a while.
+There's no hurry.  And I don't want to lose you yet."
+
+But there were other things.  Dick himself varied.  He was always
+gentle and very tender, but there were times when he seemed to
+hold himself away from her, would seem aloof and remote, but all
+the time watching her almost fiercely.  But after that, as though
+he had tried an experiment in separation and failed with it, he
+would catch her to him savagely and hold her there.  She tried,
+very meekly, to meet his mood; was submissive to his passion and
+acquiescent to those intervals when he withdrew himself and sat or
+stood near her, not touching her but watching her intently.
+
+She thought men in love were very queer and quite incomprehensible.
+Because he varied in other ways, too.  He was boyish and gay
+sometimes, and again silent and almost brooding.  She thought at
+those times that perhaps he was tired, what with David's work and
+his own, and sometimes she wondered if he were still worrying about
+that silly story.  But once or twice, after he had gone, she went
+upstairs and looked carefully into her mirror.  Perhaps she had not
+looked her best that day.  Girl-like, she set great value on looks
+in love.  She wanted frightfully to be beautiful to him.  She wished
+she could look like Beverly Carlysle, for instance.
+
+Two days before David and Lucy's departure he had brought her her
+engagement ring, a square-cut diamond set in platinum.  He kissed
+it first and then her finger, and slipped it into place.  It became
+a rite, done as he did it, and she had a sense of something done that
+could never be undone.  When she looked up at him he was very pale.
+
+"Forsaking all others, so long as we both shall live," he said,
+unsteadily.
+
+"So long as we both shall live," she repeated.
+
+However she had to take it off later, for Mrs. Wheeler, it developed,
+had very pronounced ideas of engagement rings.  They were put on the
+day the notices were sent to the newspapers, and not before.  So
+Elizabeth wore her ring around her neck on a white ribbon, inside
+her camisole, until such time as her father would consent to announce
+that he was about to lose her.
+
+Thus Elizabeth found her engagement full of unexpected turns and
+twists, and nothing precisely as she had expected.  But she accepted
+things as they came, being of the type around which the dramas of
+life are enacted, while remaining totally undramatic herself.  She
+lived her quiet days, worried about Jim on occasion, hemmed table
+napkins for her linen chest, and slept at night with her ring on
+her finger and a sense of being wrapped in protecting love that was
+no longer limited to the white Wheeler house, but now extended two
+blocks away and around the corner to a shabby old brick building
+in a more or less shabby yard.
+
+They were very gay in the old brick house that night before the
+departure, very noisy over the fish and David's broiled lamb chop.
+Dick demanded a bottle of Lucy's home-made wine, and even David
+got a little of it.  They toasted the seashore, and the departed
+nurse, and David quoted Robert Burns at some length and in a horrible
+Scotch accent.  Then Dick had a trick by which one read the date on
+one of three pennies while he was not looking, and he could tell
+without failing which one it was.  It was most mysterious.  And
+after dinner Dick took her into his laboratory, and while she
+squinted one eye and looked into the finder of his microscope he
+kissed the white nape of her neck.
+
+When they left the laboratory there were patients in the
+waiting-room, but he held her in his arms in the office for a
+moment or two, very quietly, and because the door was thin they made
+a sort of game of it, and pretended she was a patient.
+
+"How did you sleep last night?" he said, in a highly professional
+and very distinct voice.  Then he kissed her.
+
+"Very badly, doctor," she said, also very clearly, and whispered,
+"I lay awake and thought about you, dear."
+
+"I'd better give you this sleeping powder." Oh, frightfully
+professional, but the powder turned out to be another kiss.  It
+was a wonderful game.
+
+When she slipped out into the hall she had to stop and smooth her
+hair, before she went to Lucy's tidy sitting-room.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+It was Jim Wheeler's turn to take up the shuttle.  A girl met in
+some casual fashion; his own youth and the urge of it, perhaps the
+unconscious family indulgence of an only son--and Jim wove his
+bit and passed on.
+
+There had been mild contention in the Wheeler family during all the
+spring.  Looking out from his quiet windows Walter Wheeler saw the
+young world going by a-wheel, and going fast.  Much that legitimately
+belonged to it, and much that did not in the laxness of the new code,
+he laid to the automobile.  And doggedly he refused to buy one.
+
+"We can always get a taxicab," was his imperturbable answer to Jim.
+"I pay pretty good-sized taxi bills without unpleasant discussion.
+I know you pretty well too, Jim.  Better than you know yourself.
+And if you had a car, you'd try your best to break your neck in it."
+
+Now and then Jim got a car, however.  Sometimes he rented one,
+sometimes he cajoled Nina into lending him hers.
+
+"A fellow looks a fool without one," he would say to her.  "Girls
+expect to be taken out.  It's part of the game."
+
+And Nina, always reached by that argument of how things looked, now
+and then reluctantly acquiesced.  But a night or two after David
+and Lucy had started for the seashore Nina came in like a whirlwind,
+and routed the family peace immediately.
+
+"Father," she said, "you just must speak to Jim.  He's taken our
+car twice at night without asking for it, and last night he broke
+a spring.  Les is simply crazy."
+
+"Taken your car!" Mrs. Wheeler exclaimed.
+
+"Yes.  I hate telling on him, but I spoke to him after the first
+time, and he did it anyhow."
+
+Mrs. Wheeler glanced at her husband uneasily.  She often felt he
+was too severe with Jim.
+
+"Don't worry," he said grimly.  "He'll not do it again."
+
+"If we only had a car of our own--" Mrs. Wheeler protested.
+
+"You know what I think about that, mother.  I'm not going to have
+him joy-riding over the country, breaking his neck and getting into
+trouble.  I've seen him driving Wallace Sayre's car, and he drives
+like a fool or a madman."
+
+It was an old dispute and a bitter one.  Mr. Wheeler got up,
+whistled for the dog, and went out.  His wife turned on Nina.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't bring these things to your father, Nina," she
+said.  "He's been very nervous lately, and he isn't always fair to
+Jim."
+
+"Well, it's time Jim was fair to Leslie," Nina said, with family
+frankness.  "I'll tell you something, mother.  Jim has a girl
+somewhere, in town probably.  He takes her driving.  I found a glove
+in the car.  And he must be crazy about her, or he'd never do what
+he's done."
+
+"Do you know who it is?"
+
+"No.  Somebody's he's ashamed of, probably, or he wouldn't be so
+clandestine about it."
+
+"Nina!"
+
+"Well, it looks like it.  Jim's a man, mother.  He's not a little
+boy.  He'll go through his shady period, like the rest."
+
+That night it was Mrs. Wheeler's turn to lie awake.  Again and again
+she went over Nina's words, and her troubled mind found a basis in
+fact for them.  Jim had been getting money from her, to supplement
+his small salary; he had been going out a great deal at night, and
+returning very late; once or twice, in the morning, he had looked
+ill and his eyes had been bloodshot, as though he had been drinking.
+
+Anxiety gripped her.  There were so many temptations for young men,
+so many who waited to waylay them.  A girl.  Not a good girl, perhaps.
+
+She raised herself on her elbow and looked at her sleeping husband.
+Men were like that; they begot children and then forgot them.  They
+never looked ahead or worried.  They were taken up with business,
+and always they forgot that once they too had been young and liable
+to temptation.
+
+She got up, some time later, and tiptoed to the door of Jim's room.
+Inside she could hear his heavy, regular breathing.  Her boy.  Her
+only son.
+
+She went back and crawled carefully into the bed.
+
+There was an acrimonious argument between Jim and his father the
+next morning, and Jim slammed out of the house, leaving chaos
+behind him.  It was then that Elizabeth learned that her father was
+going away.  He said:
+
+"Maybe I'm wrong, mother.  I don't know.  Perhaps, when I come back,
+I'll look around for a car.  I don't want him driven to doing
+underhand things."
+
+"Are you going away?" Elizabeth asked, surprised.
+
+It appeared that he was.  More than that, that he was going West
+with Dick.  It was all arranged and nobody had told her anything
+about it.
+
+She was hurt and a trifle offended, and she cried a little about it.
+Yet, as Dick explained to her later that day, it was simple enough.
+Her father needed a rest, and besides, it was right that he should
+know all about Dick's life before he came to Haverly.
+
+"He's going to make me a present of something highly valuable,
+you know."
+
+"But it looks as though he didn't trust you!"
+
+"He's being very polite about it; but, of course, in his eyes I'm
+a common thief, stealing--"
+
+She would not let him go on.
+
+A certain immaturity, the blind confidence of youth in those it
+loves, explains Elizabeth's docility at that time.  But underneath
+her submission that day was a growing uneasiness, fiercely
+suppressed.  Buried deep, the battle between absolute trust and
+fear was beginning, a battle which was so rapidly to mature her.
+
+Nina, shrewd and suspicious, sensed something of nervous strain
+in her when she came in, later that day, to borrow a hat.
+
+"Look here, Elizabeth," she began, "I want to talk to you.  Are
+you going to live in this--this hole all your life?"
+
+"Hole nothing," Elizabeth said, hotly.  "Really, Nina, I do think
+you might be more careful of what you say."
+
+"Oh, it's a dear old hole," Nina said negligently.  "But hole it
+is, nevertheless.  Why in the world mother don't manage her servants
+--but no matter about that now.  Elizabeth, there's a lot of talk
+about you and Dick Livingstone, and it makes me furious.  When I
+think that you can have Wallie Sayre by lifting your finger--"
+
+"And that I don't intend to lift my finger," Elizabeth interrupted.
+
+"Then you're a fool.  And it is Dick Livingstone!"
+
+"It is, Nina."
+
+Nina's ambitious soul was harrowed.
+
+"That stodgy old house," she said, "and two old people! A general
+house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out!  I wish you
+joy of it."
+
+"I wonder," Elizabeth said calmly, "whether it ever occurs to you
+that I may put love above houses and servants?  Or that my life is
+my own, to live exactly as I please?  Because that is what I intend
+to do."
+
+Nina rose angrily.
+
+"Thanks," she said.  "I wish you joy of it."  And went out,
+slamming the door behind her.
+
+Then, with only a day or so remaining before Dick's departure, and
+Jim's hand already reaching for the shuttle, Elizabeth found
+herself the object of certain unmistakable advances from Mrs. Sayre
+herself, and that at a rose luncheon at the house on the hill.
+
+The talk about Dick and Elizabeth had been slow in reaching the
+house on the hill.  When it came, via a little group on the terrace
+after the luncheon, Mrs. Sayre was upset and angry and inclined to
+blame Wallie.  Everything that he wanted had come to him, all his
+life, and he did not know how to go after things.  He had sat by,
+and let this shabby-genteel doctor, years older than the girl, walk
+away with her.
+
+Not that she gave up entirely.  She knew the town, and its tendency
+toward over-statement.  And so she made a desperate attempt, that
+afternoon, to tempt Elizabeth.  She took her through the greenhouses,
+and then through the upper floors of the house.  She showed her
+pictures of their boat at Miami, and of the house at Marblehead.
+Elizabeth was politely interested and completely unresponsive.
+
+"When you think," Mrs. Sayre said at last, "that Wallie will have
+to assume a great many burdens one of these days, you can understand
+how anxious I am to have him marry the right sort of girl."
+
+She thought Elizabeth flushed slightly.
+
+"I am sure he will, Mrs. Sayre."
+
+Mrs. Sayre tried a new direction.
+
+"He will have all I have, my dear, and it is a great responsibility.
+Used properly, money can be an agent of great good.  Wallie's wife
+can be a power, if she so chooses.  She can look after the poor.  I
+have a long list of pensioners, but I am too old to add personal
+service."
+
+"That would be wonderful," Elizabeth said gravely.  For a moment
+she wished Dick were rich.  There was so much to be done with money,
+and how well he would know how to do it.  She was thoughtful on the
+way downstairs, and Mrs. Sayre felt some small satisfaction.  Now if
+Wallie would only do his part--
+
+It was that night that Jim brought the tragedy on the Wheeler house
+that was to lie heavy on it for many a day.
+
+There had been a little dinner, one of those small informal affairs
+where Mrs. Wheeler, having found in the market the first of the
+broiling chickens and some fine green peas, bought them first and
+then sat down to the telephone to invite her friends.  Mr. Oglethorpe,
+the clergyman, and his wife accepted cheerfully; Harrison Miller,
+resignedly.  Then Mrs. Wheeler drew a long, resolute breath and
+invited Mrs. Sayre.  When that lady accepted with alacrity Mrs.
+Wheeler hastily revised her menu, telephoned the florist for flowers,
+and spent a long half-hour with Annie over plates and finger bowls.
+
+Jim was not coming home, and Elizabeth was dining with Nina.  Mrs.
+Wheeler bustled about the house contentedly.  Everything was going
+well, after all.  Before long there would be a car, and Jim would
+spend more time at home.  Nina and Leslie were happy again.  And
+Elizabeth--not a good match, perhaps, but a marriage for love, if
+ever there was one.
+
+She sat at the foot of her table that night, rather too watchful
+of Annie, but supremely content.  She had herself scoured the
+loving cup to the last degree of brightness and it stood, full of
+flowers, in the center of the cloth.
+
+At Nina's was a smaller but similar group.  All over the village
+at that time in the evening were similar groups, gathered around
+flowers and candles; neatly served, cheerful and undramatic groups,
+with the house doors closed and dogs waiting patiently outside in
+the long spring twilight.
+
+Elizabeth was watching Nina.  Just so, she was deciding, would she
+some day preside at her own board.  Perhaps before so very long,
+too.  A little separation, letters to watch for and answer, and
+then--
+
+The telephone rang, and Leslie answered it.  He did not come back;
+instead they heard the house door close, and soon after the rumble
+of the car as it left the garage.  It stopped at the door, and
+Leslie came in.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said, "but I guess Elizabeth will have to go home.
+You'd better come along, Nina."
+
+"What is it? Is somebody sick?" Elizabeth gasped.
+
+"Jim's been in an automobile accident.  Steady now, Elizabeth! He's
+hurt, but he's going to be all right."
+
+The Wheeler house, when they got there, was brightly lighted.
+Annie was crying in the hall, and in the living-room Mrs. Sayre
+stood alone, a strange figure in a gaudy dress, but with her face
+strong and calm.
+
+"They've gone to the hospital in my car," she said.  "They'll be
+there now any minute, and Mr. Oglethorpe will telephone at once.
+You are to wait before starting in."
+
+They all knew what that meant.  It might be too late to start in.
+Nina was crying hysterically, but Elizabeth could not cry.  She
+stood dry-eyed by the telephone, listening to Mrs. Sayre and
+Leslie, but hardly hearing them.  They had got Dick Livingstone
+and he had gone on in.  Mrs. Sayre was afraid it had been one of
+Wallie's cars.  She had begged Wallie to tell Jim to be careful in
+it.  It had too much speed.
+
+The telephone rang and Leslie took the receiver and pushed Elizabeth
+gently aside.  He listened for a moment.
+
+"Very well," he said.  Then he hung up and stood still before he
+turned around:
+
+"It isn't very good news," he said.  "I wish I could--Elizabeth!"
+
+Elizabeth had crumpled up in a small heap on the floor.
+
+All through the long night that followed, with the movement of feet
+through the halls, with her mother's door closing and the ghastly
+silence that followed it, with the dawn that came through the
+windows, the dawn that to Jim meant not a new day, but a new life
+beyond their living touch, all through the night Elizabeth was aware
+of two figures that came and went.  One was Dick, quiet, tender and
+watchful.  And one was of a heavy woman in a gaudy dress, her face
+old and weary in the morning light, who tended her with gentle hands.
+
+She fell asleep as the light was brightening in the East, with Dick
+holding her hands and kneeling on the floor beside her bed.
+
+It was not until the next day that they knew that Jim had not been
+alone.  A girl who was with him had been pinned under the car and
+had died instantly.
+
+Jim had woven his bit in the pattern and passed on.  The girl was
+negligible; she was, she had been.  That was all.  But Jim's death
+added the last element to the impending catastrophe.  It sent Dick
+West alone.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+For several days after his visit to the Livingstone ranch Louis
+Bassett made no move to go to the cabin.  He wandered around the
+town, made promiscuous acquaintances and led up, in careful
+conversations with such older residents as he could find, to the
+Clark and Livingstone families.  Of the latter he learned nothing;
+of the former not much that he had not known before.
+
+One day he happened on a short, heavy-set man, the sheriff, who had
+lost his office on the strength of Jud Clark's escape, and had now
+recovered it.  Bassett had brought some whisky with him, and on the
+promise of a drink lured Wilkins to his room.  Over his glass the
+sheriff talked.
+
+"All this newspaper stuff lately about Jud Clark being alive is
+dead wrong," he declared, irritably.  "Maggie Donaldson was crazy.
+You can ask the people here about her.  They all know it.  Those
+newspaper fellows descended on us here with a tooth-brush apiece
+and a suitcase full of liquor, and thought they'd get something.
+Seemed to think we'd hold out on them unless we got our skins full.
+But there isn't anything to hold out.  Jud Clark's dead.  That's all."
+
+"Sure he's dead," Bassett agreed, amiably.  "You found his horse,
+didn't you?"
+
+"Yes.  Dead.  And when you find a man's horse dead in the mountains
+in a blizzard, you don't need any more evidence.  It was five months
+before you could see a trail up the Goat that winter."
+
+Bassett nodded, rose and poured out another drink.
+
+"I suppose," he observed casually, "that even if Clark turned up
+now, it would be hard to convict him, wouldn't it?"
+
+The sheriff considered that, holding up his glass.
+
+"Well, yes and no," he said.  "It was circumstantial evidence,
+mostly.  Nobody saw it done.  The worst thing against him was his
+running off."
+
+"How about witnesses?"
+
+"Nobody actually saw it done.  John Donaldson came the nearest, and
+he's dead.  Lucas's wife was still alive, the last I heard, and I
+reckon the valet is floating around somewhere."
+
+"I suppose if he did turn up you'd make a try for it." Bassett
+stared at the end of his cigar.
+
+"We'd make a try for it, all right," Wilkins said somberly.  "There
+are some folks in this county still giving me the laugh over that
+case."
+
+The next day Bassett hired a quiet horse, rolled in his raincoat
+two days' supply of food, strapped it to the cantle of his saddle,
+and rode into the mountains.  He had not ridden for years, and at
+the end of the first hour he began to realize that he was in for a
+bad time.  By noon he was so sore that he could hardly get out of
+the saddle, and so stiff that once out, he could barely get back
+again.  All morning the horse had climbed, twisting back and forth
+on a narrow canyon trail, grunting occasionally, as is the way of
+a horse on a steep grade.  All morning they had followed a roaring
+mountain stream, descending in small cataracts from the ice fields
+far above.  And all morning Bassett had been mentally following
+that trail as it had been ridden ten years ago by a boy maddened
+with fear and drink, who drove his horse forward through the night
+and the blizzard, with no objective and no hope.
+
+He found it practically impossible to connect this frenzied fugitive
+with the quiet man in his office chair at Haverly, the man who was
+or was not Judson Clark.  He lay on a bank at noon and faced the
+situation squarely, while his horse, hobbled, grazed with grotesque
+little forward jumps in an upland meadow.  Either Dick Livingstone
+was Clark, or he was the unknown occasional visitor at the
+Livingstone Ranch.  If he were Clark, and if that could be proved,
+there were two courses open to Bassett.  He could denounce him to
+the authorities and then spring the big story of his career.  Or he
+could let things stand.  From a professional standpoint the first
+course attracted him, as a man he began to hate it.  The last few
+days had shed a new light on Judson Clark.  He had been immensely
+popular; there were men in the town who told about trying to save
+him from himself.  He had been extravagant, but he had also been
+generous.  He had been "a good kid," until liberty and money got
+hold of him.  There had been more than one man in the sheriff's
+posse who hadn't wanted to find him.
+
+He was tempted to turn back.  The mountains surrounded him, somber
+and majestically still.  They made him feel infinitely small and
+rather impertinent, as though he had come to penetrate the secrets
+they never yielded.  He had almost to fight a conviction that they
+were hostile.
+
+After an hour or so he determined to go on.  Let them throw him
+over a gorge if they so determined.  He got up, grunting, and
+leading the horse beside a boulder, climbed painfully into the
+saddle.  To relieve his depression he addressed the horse:
+
+"It would be easier on both of us if you were two feet narrower in
+the beam, old dear," he said.
+
+Nevertheless, he made good time.  By six o'clock he knew that he
+must have made thirty odd miles, and that he must be near the cabin.
+Also that it was going to be bitterly cold that night, under the
+snow fields, and that he had brought no wood axe.  The deep valley
+was purple with twilight by seven, and he could scarcely see the
+rough-drawn trail map he had been following.  And the trail grew
+increasingly bad.  For the last mile or two the horse took its
+own way.
+
+It wandered on, through fords and out of them, under the low-growing
+branches of scrub pine, brushing his bruised legs against rocks.
+He had definitely decided that he had missed the cabin when the
+horse turned off the trail, and he saw it.
+
+It was built of rough logs, the chinks once closed with mud which
+had fallen away.  The door stood open, and his entrance into its
+darkness was followed by the scurrying of many little feet.
+Bassett unstrapped his raincoat from the saddle with fingers numb
+with cold, and flung it to the ground.  He uncinched and removed
+the heavy saddle, hobbled his horse and removed the bridle, and
+turned him loose with a slap on the flank.
+
+"For the love of Mike, don't go far, old man," he besought him.
+And was startled by the sound of his own voice.
+
+By the light of his candle lantern the prospects were extremely
+poor.  The fir branches in the double-berthed bunk were dry and
+useless, the floor was crumbling under his feet, and the roof of the
+lean-to had fallen in and crushed the rusty stove.  In the cabin
+itself some one had recently placed a large flat stone in a corner
+for a fireplace, with two slabs to back it, and above it had broken
+out a corner of the roof as a chimney.  Bassett thought he saw the
+handwork of some enterprising journalist, and smiled grimly.
+
+He set to work with the resource of a man who had learned to take
+what came, threw the dry bedding onto the slab and set a match to
+it, brought in portions of the lean-to roof for further supply for
+the fire, opened a can of tomatoes and set it on the edge of the
+hearth to heat, and sliced bacon into his diminutive frying-pan.
+
+It was too late for any examination that night.  He ate his supper
+from the rough table, drawing up to it a broken chair, and
+afterwards brought in more wood for his fire.  Then, with a lighted
+cigar, and with his boots steaming on the hearth, he sat in front
+of the blaze and fell into deep study.
+
+He was aching in every muscle when he finally stretched out on the
+bare boards of the lower bunk.  While he slept small furry noses
+appeared in the openings in the broken floor, to be followed by
+little bodies that moved cautiously out into the open.  He roused
+once and peered over the edge of the bunk.  Several field mice were
+basking in front of the dying embers of the fire, and two were
+sitting on his boots.  He grinned at them and lay back again, but
+he found himself fully awake and very uncomfortable.  He lay there,
+contemplating his own folly, and demanding of himself almost
+fiercely what he had expected to get out of all this effort and
+misery.  For ten years or so men had come here.  Wilkins had come,
+for one, and there had been others.  And had found nothing, and had
+gone away.  And now he was there, the end of the procession, to
+look for God knows what.
+
+He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly.
+Then--he was not an imaginative man--he began to feel that eyes
+were staring at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.
+
+Without moving he began to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to
+wall, corner to corner.  He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the
+door into the lean-to.  It gaped, cavernous and empty.  But the
+sense of being watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor
+the field mice had disappeared.
+
+He began gradually to see more clearly as his eyes grew accustomed
+to the semi-darkness, and he felt, too, that he could almost locate
+the direction of the menace.  For as a menace he found himself
+considering it.  It was the broken, windowless East wall, opposite
+the bunk.
+
+After a time the thing became intolerable.  He reached for his
+revolver, and getting quickly out of the bunk, ran to the doorway
+and threw open the door, to find himself peering into a blackness
+like a wall, and to hear a hasty crunching of the underbrush that
+sounded like some animal in full flight.
+
+With the sounds, and his own movement, the terror died.  The cold
+night air on his face, the feel of the pine needles under his
+stockinged feet, brought him back to sense and normality.  Some
+creature of the wilderness, a deer or a bear, perhaps, had been
+moving stealthily outside the cabin, and it was sound he had heard,
+not a gaze he had felt.  He was rather cynically amused at himself.
+He went back into the cabin, closed the door, and stooped to turn
+his boots over before the fire.
+
+It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off
+along the trail.
+
+He did not go to sleep again.  Now and then he considered the
+possibility of its having been his own animal, somehow freed of
+the rope and frightened by the same thing that had frightened him.
+But when with the first light he went outside, his horse, securely
+hobbled, was grazing on the scant pasture not far away.
+
+Before he cooked his breakfast he made a minute examination of the
+ground beneath the East wall, but the earth was hard, and a broken
+branch or two might have been caused by his horse.  He had no skill
+in woodcraft, and in the broad day his alarm seemed almost absurd.
+Some free horse on the range had probably wandered into the vicinity
+of the cabin, and had made off again on a trot.  Nevertheless, he
+made up his mind not to remain over another night, but to look about
+after breakfast, and then to start down again.
+
+He worked on his boots, dry and hard after yesterday's wetting,
+fried his bacon and dropped some crackers into the sizzling fat,
+and ate quickly.  After that he went out to the trail and inspected
+it.  He had an idea that range horses were mostly unshod, and that
+perhaps the trail would reveal something.  But it was unused and
+overgrown.  Not until he had gone some distance did he find anything.
+Then in a small bare spot he found in the dust the imprints of a
+horse's shoes, turned down the trail up which he had come.
+
+Even then he was slow to read into the incident anything that
+related to himself or to his errand.  He went over the various
+contingencies of the trail: a ranger, on his way to town; a forest
+fire somewhere; a belated hound from the newspaper pack.  He was
+convinced now that human eyes had watched him for some time through
+the log wall the night before, but he could not connect them with
+the business in hand.
+
+He set resolutely about his business, which was to turn up, somehow,
+some way, a proof of the truth of Maggie Donaldson's dying statement.
+To begin with then he accepted that statement, to find where it would
+lead him, and it led him, eventually, to the broken-down stove under
+the fallen roof of the lean-to.
+
+He deliberately set himself to work, at first, to reconstruct the
+life in the cabin.  Jud would have had the lower bunk, David the
+upper.  The skeleton of a cot bed in the lean-to would have been
+Maggie's.  But none of them yielded anything.
+
+Very well.  Having accepted that they lived here, it was from here
+that the escape was made.  They would have started the moment the
+snow was melted enough to let them get out, and they would have
+taken, not the trail toward the town, but some other and circuitous
+route toward the railroad.  But there had been things to do before
+they left.  They would have cleared the cabin of every trace of
+occupancy; the tin cans, Clark's clothing, such bedding as they
+could not carry.  The cans must have been a problem; the clothes,
+of course, could have been burned.  But there were things, like
+buttons, that did not burn easily.  Clark's watch, if he wore one,
+his cuff links.  Buried?
+
+It occurred to him that they might have disposed of some of the
+unburnable articles under the floor, and he lifted a rough board or
+two.  But to pursue the search systematically he would have needed
+a pickaxe, and reluctantly he gave it up and turned his attention
+to the lean-to and the buried stove.
+
+The stove lay in a shallow pit, filled with ancient ashes and
+crumbled bits of wood from the roof.  It lay on its side, its
+sheet-iron sides collapsed, its long chimney disintegrated.  He
+was in a heavy sweat before he had uncovered it and was able to
+remove it from its bed of ashes and pine needles.  This done, he
+brought his candle-lantern and settled himself cross-legged on the
+ground.
+
+His first casual inspection of the ashes revealed nothing.  He set
+to work more carefully then, picking them up by handfuls, examining
+and discarding.  Within ten minutes he had in a pile beside him
+some burned and blackened metal buttons, the eyelets and a piece
+of leather from a shoe, and the almost unrecognizable nib of a
+fountain pen.
+
+He sat with them in the palm of his hand.  Taken alone, each one
+was insignificant, proved nothing whatever.  Taken all together,
+they assumed vast proportions, became convincing, became evidence.
+
+Late that night he descended stiffly at the livery stable, and
+turned his weary horse over to a stableman.
+
+"Looks dead beat," said the stableman, eyeing the animal.
+
+"He's got nothing on me," Bassett responded cheerfully.  "Better
+give him a hot bath and put him to bed.  That's what I'm going to do."
+
+He walked back to the hotel, glad to stretch his aching muscles.
+The lobby was empty, and behind the desk the night clerk was waiting
+for the midnight train.  Bassett was wide awake by that time, and he
+went back to the desk and lounged against it.
+
+"You look as though you'd struck oil," said the night clerk.
+
+"Oil! I'll tell you what I have struck.  I've struck a livery stable
+saddle two million times in the last two days."
+
+The clerk grinned, and Bassett idly pulled the register toward him.
+
+"J.  Smith, Minneapolis," he read.  Then he stopped and stared.
+Richard Livingstone was registered on the next line above.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in
+her grief with childish wistfulness.  He found, too, that her family
+depended on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support.  It
+was to him that Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father
+had had no indirect responsibility for the son's death; it was to
+him that Jim's mother, lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or
+on her couch, brought her anxious questionings.  Had Jim suffered?
+Could they have avoided it? And an insistent demand to know who and
+what had been the girl who was with him.
+
+In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada
+quickly, before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a
+few hours to find the answer to that question.  But when he found
+it he could not tell them.  The girl had been a dweller in the shady
+byways of life, had played her small unmoral part and gone on,
+perhaps to some place where men were kinder and less urgent.  Dick
+did not judge her.  He saw her, as her kind had been through all
+time, storm centers of the social world, passively and unconsciously
+blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.
+
+He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick
+rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather
+uncomfortably for the mistress of the place to see him.  She came
+at last, a big woman, vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose
+smile, and she came in with the light step of the overfleshed, only
+to pause in the doorway and to stare at him.
+
+"My God!" she said.  "I thought you were dead!"
+
+"I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?"
+
+She looked at him carefully.
+
+"I'd have sworn--" she muttered, and turning to the button inside
+the door she switched on the light.  Then she surveyed him again.
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Livingstone.  Doctor Livingstone.  I called--"
+
+"Is that for me, or for the police?"
+
+"Now see here," he said pleasantly.  "I don't know who you are
+mistaking me for, and I'm not hiding from the police.  Here's my
+card, and I have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler,
+who was killed recently in an automobile accident."
+
+She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny
+of him.
+
+"Well, you fooled me all right," she said at last.  "I thought you
+were--well, never mind that.  What about this Wheeler family? Are
+they going to settle with the undertaker?  Because I tell you flat,
+I can't and won't.  She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes
+won't bring over seventy-five or a hundred dollars."
+
+As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after
+him.  He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a
+kindly story to tell the family.  He could not let them know that
+Jim had been seeking love in the byways of life.  And that night he
+mailed a check in payment of the undertaker's bill, carefully
+leaving the stub empty.
+
+On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada.  An
+interne from a local hospital, having newly finished his service
+there, had agreed to take over his work for a time.  But Dick was
+faintly jealous when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office,
+and turned him over to a mystified Minnie to look after.
+
+"Is he going to sleep in your bed?" she demanded belligerently.
+
+She was only partially mollified when she found Doctor Reynolds
+was to have the spare room.  She did not like the way things were
+going, she confided to Mike.  Why wasn't she to let on to Mrs.
+Crosby that Doctor Dick had gone away?  Or to the old doctor?  Both
+of them away, and that little upstart in the office ready to steal
+their patients and hang out his own sign the moment they got back!
+
+Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along
+an extremely crooked path.  He wrote a half dozen pleasant,
+non-committal letters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time
+on them, and gave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals.
+But his chief difficulty was with Elizabeth.  Perhaps he would have
+told her; there were times when he had to fight his desire to have
+her share his anxiety as well as know the truth about him.  But she
+was already carrying the burden of Jim's tragedy, and her father,
+too, was insistent that she be kept in ignorance.
+
+"Until she can have the whole thing," he said, with the new
+heaviness which had crept into his voice.
+
+Beside that real trouble Dick's looked dim and nebulous.  Other
+things could be set right; there was always a fighting chance.  It
+was only death that was final.
+
+Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing
+in a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face,
+and a determined smile.  He pulled her arm through his, so he
+might hold her hand, and when he found that she was wearing her
+ring he drew her even closer, with a wave of passionate possession.
+
+"You are mine.  My little girl."
+
+"I am yours.  For ever and ever."
+
+But they assumed a certain lightness after that, each to cheer the
+other.  As when she asserted that she was sure she would always
+know the moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with
+any number of people about, and said:
+
+"That's simply terrible!  Suppose, when we are married, my mind
+turns on such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions?  Will you
+simply walk out on me?"
+
+He stood on the lowest step of the train until her figure was lost
+in the darkness, and the porter expostulated.  He was, that night,
+a little drunk with love, and he did not read the note she had
+thrust into his hand at the last moment until he was safely in his
+berth, his long figure stretched diagonally to find the length it
+needed.
+
+"Darling, darling Dick," she had written.  "I wonder so often how
+you can care for me, or what I have done to deserve you.  And I
+cannot write how I feel, just as I cannot say it.  But, Dick dear,
+I have such a terrible fear of losing you, and you are my life now.
+You will be careful and not run any risks, won't you?  And just
+remember this always.  Wherever you are and wherever I am, I am
+thinking of you and waiting for you."
+
+He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept
+with it in the pocket of his pajama coat.
+
+Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the Commercial
+Hotel.  The town itself conveyed nothing to him.  He found it
+totally unfamiliar, and for its part the town passed him by without
+a glance.  A new field had come in, twenty miles from the old one,
+and had brought with it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers,
+and lease buyers.  The hotel was crowded.
+
+That was his first disappointment.  He had been nursing the hope
+that surroundings which he must once have known well would assist
+him in finding himself.  That was the theory, he knew.  He stood at
+the window of his hotel room, with its angular furniture and the
+Gideon Bible, and for the first time he realized the difficulty
+of what he had set out to do.  Had he been able to take David into
+his confidence he would have had the names of one or two men to go
+to, but as things were he had nothing.
+
+The almost morbid shrinking he felt from exposing his condition
+was increased, rather than diminished, in the new surroundings.
+He would, of course, go to the ranch at Dry River, and begin his
+inquiries from there, but not until now had he realized what that
+would mean; his recognition by people he could not remember, the
+questions he could not answer.
+
+He knew the letter to David from beginning to end, but he got it
+out and read it again.  Who was this Bassett, and what mischief
+was he up to?  Why should he himself be got out of town quickly
+and the warning burned?  Who was "G"?  And why wouldn't the simplest
+thing be to locate this Bassett himself?
+
+The more he considered that the more obvious it seemed as a solution,
+provided of course he could locate the man.  Whether Bassett were
+friendly or inimical, he was convinced that he knew or was finding
+out something concerning himself which David was keeping from him.
+
+He was relieved when he went down to the desk to find that his man
+was registered there, although the clerk reported him out of town.
+But the very fact that only a few hours or days separated him from
+a solution of the mystery heartened him.
+
+He ate his dinner alone, unnoticed, and after dinner, in the writing
+room, with its mission furniture and its traveling men copying
+orders, he wrote a letter to Elizabeth.  Into it he put some of the
+things that lay too deep for speech when he was with her, and
+because he had so much to say and therefore wrote extremely fast,
+a considerable portion of it was practically illegible.  Then, as
+though he could hurry the trains East, he put a special delivery
+stamp on it.
+
+With that off his mind, and the need of exercise after the trip
+insistent, he took his hat and wandered out into the town.  The
+main street was crowded; moving picture theaters were summoning
+their evening audiences with bright lights and colored posters,
+and automobiles lined the curb.  But here and there an Indian with
+braids and a Stetson hat, or a cowpuncher from a ranch in boots
+and spurs reminded him that after all this was the West, the horse
+and cattle country.  It was still twilight, and when he had left
+the main street behind him he began to have a sense of the familiar.
+Surely he had stood here before, had seen the court-house on its
+low hill, the row of frame houses in small gardens just across the
+street.  It seemed infinitely long ago, but very real.  He even
+remembered dimly an open place at the other side of the building
+where the ranchmen tied their horses.  To test himself he walked
+around.  Yes, it was there, but no horses stood there now, heads
+drooping, bridle reins thrown loosely over the rail.  Only a muddy
+automobile, without lights, and a dog on guard beside it.
+
+He spoke to the dog, and it came and sniffed at him.  Then it
+squatted in front of him, looking up into his face.
+
+"Lonely, old chap, aren't you?" he said.  "Well, you've got
+nothing on me."
+
+He felt a little cheered as he turned back toward the hotel.  A few
+encounters with the things of his youth, and perhaps the cloud
+would clear away.  Already the court-house had stirred some
+memories.  And on turning back down the hill he had another swift
+vision, photographically distinct but unrelated to anything that
+had preceded or followed it.  It was like a few feet cut from a
+moving picture film.
+
+He was riding down that street at night on a small horse, and his
+father was beside him on a tall one.  He looked up at his father,
+and he seemed very large.  The largest man in the world.  And the
+most important.
+
+It began and stopped there, and his endeavor to follow it further
+resulted in its ultimately leaving him.  It faded, became less real,
+until he wondered if he had not himself conjured it.  But that
+experience taught him something.  Things out of the past would come
+or they would not come, but they could not be forced.  One could not
+will to revive them.
+
+He stood at a window facing north that night, under the impression
+it was east, and sent his love and an inarticulate sort of prayer
+to Elizabeth, for her safety and happiness, in the general direction
+of the Arctic Circle.
+
+Bassett had not returned in the morning, and he found himself with
+a day on his hands.  He decided to try the experiment of visiting
+the Livingstone ranch, or at least of viewing it from a safe
+distance, with the hope of a repetition of last night's experience.
+Of all his childish memories the ranch house, next to his father,
+was most distinct.  When he had at various times tried to analyze
+what things he recalled he had found that what they lacked of normal
+memory was connection.  They stood out, like the one the night
+before, each complete in itself, brief, and having no apparent
+relation to what had gone before or what came after.
+
+But the ranch house had been different.  The pictures were mostly
+superimposed on it; it was their background.  Himself standing on
+the mountain looking down at it, and his father pointing to it;
+the tutor who was afraid of horses, sitting at a big table in a
+great wood-ceiled and wood-paneled room; a long gallery or porch
+along one side of the building and rooms added on to the house so
+that one had to go along the gallery to reach them; a gun-room
+full of guns.
+
+When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found
+his recollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one
+thing stood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost
+incredible fact that for one entire day and for the evening of
+another, he had openly appeared in Norada and had not been
+recognized.  That fact was his discovery that the Livingstone ranch
+house had no place in his memory whatever.
+
+He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this
+was the old Livingstone ranch house.  And it bore no resemblance,
+not the faintest, to the building he remembered.  It did not lie
+where it should have lain.  The mountains were too far behind it.
+It was not the house.  The fields were not the proper fields.  It
+was wrong, all wrong.
+
+He went no closer than the highway, because it was not necessary.
+He ordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only
+time he was filled with bitter resentment against David.  David had
+fooled him.  He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his
+eyes hot, and let his indignation burn in him like a flame.
+
+Hours afterwards he had, of course, found excuses for David.
+Accepted them, rather, as a part of the mystery which wrapped him
+about.  But they had no effect on the decision he made during that
+miserable ride back to Norada, when he determined to see the man
+Bassett and get the truth out of him if he had to choke it out.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+Bassett was astounded when he saw Dick's signature on the hotel
+register.  It destroyed, in one line, every theory he held.  That
+Judson Clark should return to Norada after his flight was
+incredible.  Ten years was only ten years after all.  It was not
+a lifetime.  There were men in the town who had known Clark well.
+
+Nevertheless for a time he held to his earlier conviction, even
+fought for it.  He went so far as to wonder if Clark had come back
+for a tardy surrender.  Men had done that before this, had carried
+a burden for years, had reached the breaking point, had broken.
+But he dismissed that.  There had been no evidence of breaking in
+the young man in the office chair.  He found himself thrown back,
+finally, on the story of the Wasson woman, and wondering if he
+would have to accept it after all.
+
+The reaction from his certainty in the cabin to uncertainty again
+made him fretful and sleepless.  It was almost morning before he
+relaxed on his hard hotel bed enough to sleep.
+
+He wakened late, and telephoned down for breakfast.  His confusion
+had not decreased with the night, and while he got painfully out
+of bed and prepared to shave and dress, his thoughts were busy.
+There was no doubt in his mind that, in spite of the growth of the
+town, the newcomer would be under arrest almost as soon as he made
+his appearance.  A resemblance that could deceive Beverly Carlysle's
+brother could deceive others, and would.  That he had escaped so
+long amazed him.
+
+By the time he had bathed he had developed a sort of philosophic
+acceptance of the new situation.  There would be no exclusive story
+now, no scoop.  The events of the next few hours were for every man
+to read.  He shrugged his shoulders as, partially dressed, he
+carried his shaving materials into the better light of his bedroom.
+
+With his face partially lathered he heard a knock at the door, and
+sang out a not uncheerful "Come in."  It happened, then, that it
+was in his mirror that he learned that his visitor was not the
+waiter, but Livingstone himself.  He had an instant of stunned
+amazement before he turned.
+
+"I beg your pardon," Dick said.  "I was afraid you'd get out before
+I saw you.  My name's Livingstone, and I want to talk to you, if
+you don't mind.  If you like I'll come back later."
+
+Bassett perceived two things simultaneously; that owing probably to
+the lather on his face he had not been recognized, and that the
+face of the man inside the door was haggard and strained.
+
+"That's all right.  Come in and sit down.  I'll get this stuff off
+my face and be with you in a jiffy."
+
+But he was very deliberate in the bathroom.  His astonishment grew,
+rather than decreased.  Clearly Livingstone had not known him.  How,
+then, had he known that he was in Norada?  And when he recognized
+him, as he would in a moment, what then?  He put on his collar and
+tied his tie slowly.  Gregory might be the key.  Gregory might have
+found out that he had started for Norada and warned him.  Then, if
+that were true, this man was Clark after all.  But if he were Clark
+he wouldn't be there.  It was like a kitten after its tail.  It
+whirled in a circle and got nowhere.
+
+The waiter had laid his breakfast and gone when he emerged from the
+bathroom, and Dick was standing by the window looking out.  He
+turned.
+
+"I'm here, Mr.  Bassett, on rather a peculiar--"  He stopped
+and looked at Bassett.  "I see.  You were in my office about a
+month ago, weren't you?"
+
+"For a headache, yes." Bassett was very wary and watchful, but there
+was no particular unfriendliness in his visitor's eyes.
+
+"It never occurred to me that you might be Bassett," Dick said
+gravely.  "Never mind about that.  Eat your breakfast.  Do you mind
+if I talk while you do it?"
+
+"Will you have some coffee?  I can get a glass from the bathroom.
+It takes a week to get a waiter here."
+
+"Thanks.  Yes."
+
+The feeling of unreality grew in the reporter's mind.  It increased
+still further when they sat opposite each other, the small table
+with its Bible on the lower shelf between them, while he made a
+pretense at breakfasting.
+
+"First of all," Dick said, at last, "I was not sure I had found the
+right man.  You are the only Bassett in the place, however, and
+you're registered from my town.  So I took a chance.  I suppose
+that headache was not genuine."
+
+Bassett hesitated.
+
+"No" he said at last.
+
+"What you really wanted to do was to see me, then?"
+
+"In a way, yes."
+
+"I'll ask you one more question.  It may clear the air.  Does this
+mean anything to you?  I'll tell you now that it doesn't, to me."
+
+From his pocketbook he took the note addressed to David, and passed
+it over the table.  Bassett looked at him quickly and took it.
+
+"Before you read it, I'll explain something.  It was not sent to me.
+It was sent to my--to Doctor David Livingstone.  It happened to
+fall into my hands.  I've come a long way to find out what it means."
+
+He paused, and looked the reporter straight in the eyes.  "I am
+laying my cards on the table, Bassett.  This 'G,' whoever he is,
+is clearly warning my uncle against you.  I want to know what he is
+warning him about."
+
+Bassett read the note carefully, and looked up.
+
+"I suppose you know who 'G' is?"
+
+"I do not.  Do you?"
+
+"I'll give you another name, and maybe you'll get it.  A name that
+I think will mean something to you.  Beverly Carlysle."
+
+"The actress?"
+
+Bassett had an extraordinary feeling of unreality, followed by one
+of doubt.  Either the fellow was a very good actor, or--
+
+"Sorry," Dick said slowly.  "I don't seem to get it.  I don't know
+that 'G' is as important as his warning.  That note's a warning."
+
+"Yes.  It's a warning.  And I don't think you need me to tell you
+what about."
+
+"Concerning my uncle, or myself?"
+
+"Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?"
+
+"That's what I'm trying to do," Dick said, with a sort of grave
+patience.
+
+The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to
+a sort of reluctant admiration.
+
+"You've got your courage with you," he observed.  "How long do you
+suppose it will be after you set foot on the streets of this town
+before you're arrested?  How do you know I won't send for the
+police myself?"
+
+"I know damned well you won't," Dick said grimly.  "Not before I'm
+through with you.  You've chosen to interest yourself in me.  I
+suppose you don't deny the imputation in that letter.  You'll grant
+that I have a right to know who and what you are, and just what you
+are interested in."
+
+"Right-o," the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and
+to stop a fencing that was getting nowhere.  "I'm connected with
+the Times-Republican, in your own fair city.  I was in the theater
+the night Gregory recognized you.  Verbum sap."
+
+"This Gregory is the 'G'?"
+
+"Oh, quit it, Clark," Bassett said, suddenly impatient.  "That
+letter's the last proof I needed.  Gregory wrote it after he'd seen
+David Livingstone.  He wouldn't have written it if he and the old
+man hadn't come to an understanding.  I've been to the cabin.  My
+God, man, I've even got the parts of your clothing that wouldn't
+burn! You can thank Maggie Donaldson for that."
+
+"Donaldson," Dick repeated.  "That was it.  I couldn't remember her
+name.  The woman in the cabin.  Maggie.  And Jack.  Jack Donaldson."
+
+He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.
+
+"Look here," Bassett said, "let me give you a drink.  You look
+all in."
+
+But Dick shook his head.
+
+"No, thanks just the same.  I'll ask you to be plain with me,
+Bassett.  I am--I have become engaged to a girl, and--well, I
+want the story.  That's all."
+
+And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:
+
+"I suppose I've begun wrong end first.  I forgot about how it must
+seem to you.  I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago.
+Can't remember it.  I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact.  What
+I'm trying to do now is to fill in the gap.  But I've got to,
+somehow.  I owe it to the girl."
+
+When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:
+
+"You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street.  And you
+rather more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is
+mixed up in it somehow.  I take it that I knew her."
+
+"Yes.  You knew her," Bassett said slowly.  At the intimation in
+his tone Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking.  His face,
+pale before, took on a grayish tinge.
+
+"I wasn't--married to her?"
+
+"No.  You didn't marry her.  See here, Clark, this is straight goods,
+is it?  You're not trying to put something over on me?  Because if
+ you are, you needn't.  I'd about made up my mind to follow the
+story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it.
+When a man's pulled himself out of the mud as you have it's not my
+business to pull him down.  But I don't want you to pull any bunk."
+
+Dick winced.
+
+"Out of the mud!" he said.  "No.  I'm telling you the truth, Bassett.
+I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names,
+and all of them, I imagine from my childhood.  I pick up at a cabin
+in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me
+soup with a tin spoon."  He tried to smile and failed.  His face
+twitched.  "I could stand it for myself," he said, "but I've tied
+another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a
+woman, and of arrest.  Arrest!  For what?"
+
+"Suppose," Bassett said after a moment, "suppose you let that go
+just now, and tell me more about this--this gap.  You're a medical
+man.  You've probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly.
+I'm accepting your statement, you see.  As a matter of fact it must
+be true, or you wouldn't be here.  But I've got to know what I'm
+doing before I lay my cards on the table.  Make it simple, if you
+can.  I don't know your medical jargon."
+
+Dick did his best.  The mind closed down now and then, mainly from
+a shock.  No, there was no injury required.  He didn't think he had
+had an injury.  A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough.
+And fear.  It was generally fear.  He had never considered himself
+braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had
+a cowardly mind.  Even if things hadn't broken as they had, he'd
+have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find
+out what it was he had been afraid of.  He paused then, to give
+Bassett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said: "Go on.
+you put your cards on the table, and then I'll lay mine out."
+
+Dick went on.  He didn't blame Bassett.  If there was something that
+was in his line of work, he understood.  At the same time he wanted
+to save David anything unpleasant.  (The word "unpleasant" startled
+Bassett, by its very inadequacy.)  He knew now that David had built
+up for him an identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted
+Bassett to know that there could never be doubt of David's high
+purpose and his essential fineness.
+
+"Whatever I was before." he finished simply, "and I'll get that
+from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work."
+
+He stood up and braced himself.  It had been clear to Bassett for
+ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period
+of revelation.  He would have it, but he was mentally bracing
+himself against it.
+
+"I think," he said, "I'll have that whisky now."
+
+Bassett poured him a small drink, and took a turn about the room
+while he drank it.  He was perplexed and apprehensive.  Strange
+as the story was, he was convinced that he had heard the truth.
+He had, now and then, run across men who came back after a brief
+disappearance, with a cock and bull story of forgetting who they
+were, and because nearly always these men vanished at the peak of
+some crisis they had always been open to suspicion.  Perhaps, poor
+devils, they had been telling the truth after all.  So the mind
+shut down, eh?  Closed like a grave over the unbearable!
+
+His own part in the threatening catastrophe began to obsess him.
+Without the warning from Gregory there would have been no return to
+Norada, no arrest.  It had all been dead and buried, until he
+himself had revived it.  And a girl, too!  The girl in the blue
+dress at the theater, of course.
+
+Dick put down the glass.
+
+"I'm ready, if you are."
+
+"Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Judson Clark?  Jud Clark?"
+
+Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.
+
+"I'm not sure," he said.  "It sounds familiar, and then it doesn't.
+It doesn't mean anything to me, if you get that.  If it's a key,
+it doesn't unlock.  That's all.  Am I Judson Clark?"
+
+Oddly enough, Bassett found himself now seeking for hope of escape
+in the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the
+story he had heard at Wasson's.  He considered, and said, almost
+violently:
+
+"Look here, I may have made a mistake.  I came out here pretty well
+convinced I'd found the solution to an old mystery, and for that
+matter I think I have.  But there's a twist in it that isn't clear,
+and until it is clear I'm not going to saddle you with an identity
+that may not belong to you.  You are one of two men.  One of them
+is Judson Clark, and I'll be honest with you; I'm pretty sure you're
+Clark.  The other I don't know, but I have reason to believe that
+he spent part of his time with Henry Livingstone at Dry River."
+
+"I went to the Livingstone ranch yesterday.  I remember my early
+home.  That wasn't it.  Which one of these two men will be arrested
+if he is recognized?"
+
+"Clark."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"I'm coming to that.  I suppose you'll have to know.  Another
+drink?  No?  All right.  About ten years ago, or a little less, a
+young chap called Judson Clark got into trouble here, and headed
+into the mountains in a blizzard.  He was supposed to have frozen
+to death.  But recently a woman named Donaldson made a confession
+on her deathbed.  She said that she had helped to nurse Clark in a
+mountain cabin, and that with the aid of some one unnamed he had
+got away."
+
+"Then I'm Clark.  I remember her, and the cabin."
+
+There was a short silence following that admission.  To Dick, it
+was filled with the thought of Elizabeth, and of her relation to
+what he was about to hear.  Again he braced himself for what was
+coming.
+
+"I suppose," he said at last, "that if I ran away I was in pretty
+serious trouble.  What was it?"
+
+"We've got no absolute proof that you are Clark, remember.  You
+don't know, and Maggie Donaldson was considered not quite sane
+before she died.  I've told you there's a chance you are the other
+man."
+
+"All right.  What had Clark done?"
+
+"He had shot a man."
+
+The reporter was instantly alarmed.  If Dick had been haggard before,
+he was ghastly now.  He got up slowly and held to the back of his chair.
+
+"Not--murder?" he asked, with stiff lips.
+
+"No," Bassett said quickly.  "Not at all.  See here, you've had
+about all you can stand.  Remember, we don't even know you are
+Clark.  All I said was--"
+
+"I understand that.  It was murder, wasn't it?"
+
+"Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand.  The law allows for
+that, I think."
+
+Dick went slowly to the window, and stood with his back to Bassett.
+For a long time the room was quiet.  In the street below long lines
+of cars in front of the hotel denoted the luncheon hour.  An Indian
+woman with a child in the shawl on her back stopped in the street,
+looked up at Dick and extended a beaded belt.  With it still
+extended she continued to stare at his white face.
+
+"The man died, of course?" he asked at last, without turning.
+
+"Yes.  I knew him.  He wasn't any great loss.  It was at the Clark
+ranch.  I don't believe a conviction would be possible, although
+they would try for one.  It was circumstantial evidence."
+
+"And I ran away?"
+
+"Clark ran away," Bassett corrected him.  "As I've told you, the
+authorities here believe he is dead."
+
+After an even longer silence Dick turned.
+
+"I told you there was a girl.  I'd like to think out some way to
+keep the thing from her, before I surrender myself.  If I can
+protect her, and David--"
+
+"I tell you, you don't even know you are Clark."
+
+"All right.  If I'm not, they'll know.  If I am--I tell you I'm
+not going through the rest of my life with a thing like that
+hanging over me.  Maggie Donaldson was sane enough.  Why, when I
+look back, I know our leaving the cabin was a flight.  I'm not
+Henry Livingstone's son, because he never had a son.  I can tell
+you what the Clark ranch house looks like."  And after a pause:
+"Can you imagine the reverse of a dream when you've dreamed you are
+guilty of something and wake up to find you are innocent?  Who was
+the man?"
+
+Bassett watched him narrowly.
+
+"His name was Lucas.  Howard Lucas."
+
+"All right.  Now we have that, where does Beverly Carlysle come in?"
+
+"Clark was infatuated with her.  The man he shot was the man she
+had married."
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+Shortly after that Dick said he would go to his room.  He was still
+pale, but his eyes looked bright and feverish, and Bassett went
+with him, uneasily conscious that something was not quite right.
+Dick spoke only once on the way.
+
+"My head aches like the mischief," he said, and his voice was dull
+and lifeless.
+
+He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went,
+nevertheless.  Dick's statement, that he meant to surrender himself,
+had filled him with uneasiness.  He determined, following him along
+the hall, to keep a close guard on him for the next few hours, but
+beyond that, just then, he did not try to go.  If it were humanly
+possible he meant to smuggle him out of the town and take him East.
+But he had an uneasy conviction that Dick was going to be ill.
+The mind did strange things with the body.
+
+Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.
+
+"My head aches like the mischief," he repeated.  "Look in that grip
+and find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy."
+
+He made an effort and stretched out on the bed.  "Good Lord," he
+muttered, "I haven't had such a headache since--"
+
+His voice trailed off.  Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in
+the corner, straightened and looked around.  Dick was suddenly
+asleep and breathing heavily.
+
+For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching
+him and trying to plan some course of action.  He was overcome by
+his own responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that
+threatened.  That Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist
+on surrendering himself when he wakened, he could no longer doubt.
+His mind wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house
+as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both
+come since then.  He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that
+life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an
+infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was
+to interfere with all the others.  David Livingstone, the girl in
+the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the
+sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all threads.
+
+He swore in a whisper.
+
+The maid tapped at the door.  He opened it an inch or so and sent
+her off.  In view of his new determination even the maid had become
+a danger.  She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own
+bedroom, and she might have known Clark.  Just what Providence had
+kept him from recognition before this he did not know, but it could
+not go on indefinitely.
+
+After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went
+down to lunch.  He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the
+room, to think without that quiet figure before him.  Over the
+pretence of food he faced the situation.  Lying ready to his hand
+was the biggest story of his career, but he could not carry it
+through.  It was characteristic of him that, before abandoning it,
+he should follow through to the end the result of its publication.
+He did not believe, for instance, that either Dick's voluntary
+surrender or his own disclosure of the situation necessarily meant
+a conviction for murder.  To convict a man of a crime he did not
+know he had committed would be difficult.  But, with his customary
+thoroughness he followed that through also.  Livingstone acquitted
+was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark.  The
+new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone.  The
+story would follow him, never to be lived down.  And in his
+particular profession confidence and respect were half the game.
+All that would be gone.
+
+Thus by gradual stages he got back to David, and he struggled for
+the motive which lay behind every decisive human act.  A man who
+followed a course by which he had nothing to gain and everything
+to lose was either a fool or was actuated by some profound
+unselfishness.  To save a life?  But with all the resources Clark
+could have commanded, added to his personal popularity, a first
+degree sentence would have been unlikely.  Not a life, then, but
+perhaps something greater than a life.  A man's soul.
+
+It came to him, then, in a great light of comprehension, the thing
+David had tried to do; to take this waster and fugitive, the slate
+of his mind wiped clean by shock and illness, only his childish
+memories remaining, and on it to lead him to write a new record.
+To take the body he had found, and the always untouched soul, and
+from them to make a man.
+
+And with that comprehension came the conviction, too, that David
+had succeeded.  He had indeed made a man.
+
+He ate absently, consulting his railroad schedule and formulating
+the arguments he meant to use against Dick's determination to give
+himself up.  He foresaw a struggle there, but he himself held one
+or two strong cards--the ruthless undoing of David's work, the
+involving of David for conspiring against the law.  And Dick's own
+obligation to the girl at home.
+
+He was more at ease in the practical arrangements.  An express went
+through on the main line at midnight, and there was a local on the
+branch line at eight.  But the local train, the railway station,
+too, were full of possible dangers.  After some thought he decided
+to get a car, drive down to the main line with Dick, and then send
+the car back.
+
+He went out at once and made an arrangement for a car, and on
+returning notified the clerk that he was going to leave, and asked
+to have his bill made out.  After some hesitation he said: "I'll
+pay three-twenty too, while I'm at it.  Friend of mine there, going
+with me.  Yes, up to to-night."
+
+As he turned away he saw the short, heavy figure of Wilkins coming
+in.  He stood back and watched.  The sheriff went to the desk,
+pulled the register toward him and ran over several pages of it.
+Then he shoved it away, turned and saw him.
+
+"Been away, haven't you?" he asked.
+
+"Yes.  I took a little horseback trip into the mountains.  My knees
+are still not on speaking terms."
+
+The sheriff chuckled.  Then he sobered.
+
+"Come and sit down," he said.  "I'm going to watch who goes in and
+out of here for a while."
+
+Bassett followed him unwillingly to two chairs that faced the desk
+and the lobby.  He had the key of Dick's room in his pocket, but he
+knew that if he wakened he could easily telephone and have his door
+unlocked.  But that was not his only anxiety.  He had a sudden
+conviction that the sheriff's watch was connected with Dick himself.
+Wilkins, from a friendly and gregarious fellow-being, had suddenly
+grown to sinister proportions in his mind.
+
+And, as the minutes went by, with the sheriff sitting forward and
+watching the lobby and staircase with intent, unblinking eyes,
+Bassett's anxiety turned to fear.  He found his heart leaping when
+the room bells rang, and the clerk, with a glance at the annunciator,
+sent boys hurrying off.  His hands shook, and he felt them cold and
+moist.  And all the time Wilkins was holding him with a flow of
+unimportant chatter.
+
+"Watching for any one in particular?" he managed, after five
+minutes or so.
+
+"Yes.  I'll tell you about it as soon as--Bill! Is Alex outside?"
+
+Bill stopped in front of them, and nodded.
+
+"All right.  Now get this--I want everything decent and in order.
+No excitement.  I'll come out behind him, and you and Bill stand by.
+Outside I'll speak to him, and when we walk off, just fall in behind.
+But keep close."
+
+Bill wandered off, to take up a stand of extreme nonchalance inside
+the entrance.  When Wilkins turned to him again Bassett had had a
+moment to adjust himself, and more or less to plan his own campaign.
+
+"Somebody's out of luck," he commented.  "And speaking of being out
+of luck, I've got a sick man on my hands.  Friend of mine from home.
+We've got to catch the midnight, too."
+
+"Too bad," Wilkins commented rather absently.  Then, perhaps feeling
+that he had not shown proper interest, "Tell you what I'll do.  I've
+got some business on hand now, but it'll be cleared up one way or
+another pretty soon.  I'll bring my car around and take him to the
+station.  These hacks are the limit to ride in."
+
+The disaster to his plans thus threatened steadied the reporter,
+and he managed to keep his face impassive.
+
+"Thanks," he said.  "I'll let you know if he's able to travel.  Is
+this--is this business you're on confidential?"
+
+"Well, it is and it isn't.  I've talked some to you, and as you're
+leaving anyhow--it's the Jud Clark case again."
+
+"Sort of hysteria, I suppose.  He'll be seen all over the country
+for the next six months."
+
+"Yes.  But I never saw a hysterical Indian.  Well, a little while
+ago an Indian woman named Lizzie Lazarus blew into my office.  She's
+a smart woman.  Her husband was a breed, dairy hand on the Clark
+ranch for years.  Lizzie was the first Indian woman in these parts
+to go to school, and besides being smart, she's got Indian sight.
+You know these Indians.  When they aren't blind with trachoma they
+can see further and better than a telescope."
+
+Bassett made an effort.
+
+"What's that got to do with Jud Clark?" he asked.
+
+"Well, she blew in.  You know there was a reward out for him, and
+I guess it still stands.  I'll have to look it up, for if Maggie
+Donaldson wasn't crazy some one will turn him up some day, probably.
+Well, Lizzie blew in, and she said she'd seen Jud Clark.  Saw him
+standing at a second story window of this hotel.  Can you beat that?"
+
+"Not for pure invention.  Hardly."
+
+"That's what I said at first.  But I don't know.  In some ways it
+would be like him.  He wouldn't mind coming back and giving us the
+laugh, if he thought he could get away with it.  He didn't know fear.
+Only time he ever showed funk was when he beat it after the shooting,
+and then he was full of hootch, and on the edge of D.T.'s."
+
+"A man doesn't play jokes with the hangman's rope," Bassett
+commented, dryly.  He looked at his watch and rose.  "It's a good
+story, but I wouldn't wear out any trouser-seats sitting here
+watching for him.  If he's living he's taken pretty good care for
+ten years not to put his head in the noose; and I'd remember this,
+too.  Wherever he is, if he is anywhere, he's probably so changed
+his appearance that Telescope Lizzie wouldn't know him.  Or you
+either."
+
+"Probably," the sheriff said, comfortably.  "Still I'm not taking
+any chances.  I'm up for reelection this fall, and that Donaldson
+woman's story nearly queered me.  I've got a fellow at the railroad
+station, just for luck."
+
+Bassett went up the stairs and along the corridor, deep in dejected
+thought.  The trap of his own making was closing, and his active
+mind was busy with schemes for getting Dick away before it shut
+entirely.
+
+It might be better, in one way, to keep Livingstone there in his
+room until the alarm blew over.  On the other hand, Livingstone
+himself had to be dealt with, and that he would remain quiescent
+under the circumstances was unlikely.  The motor to the main line
+seemed to be the best thing.  True, he would have first to get
+Livingstone to agree to go.  That done, and he did not
+underestimate its difficulty, there was the question of getting
+him out of the hotel, now that the alarm had been given.
+
+When he found Dick still sleeping he made a careful survey of the
+second floor.  There was a second staircase, but investigation
+showed that it led into the kitchens.  He decided finally on a
+fire-escape from a rear hall window, which led into a courtyard
+littered with the untidy rubbish of an overcrowded and undermanned
+hotel, and where now two or three saddled horses waited while their
+riders ate within.
+
+When he had made certain that he was not observed he unlocked and
+opened the window, and removed the wire screen.  There was a red
+fire-exit lamp in the ceiling nearby, but he could not reach it,
+nor could he find any wall switch.  Nevertheless he knew by that
+time that through the window lay Dick's only chance of escape.  He
+cleared the grating of a broken box and an empty flower pot, stood
+the screen outside the wall, and then, still unobserved, made his
+way back to his own bedroom and packed his belongings.
+
+Dick was still sleeping, stretched on his bed, when he returned
+to three-twenty.  And here Bassett's careful plans began to go awry,
+for Dick's body was twitching, and his face was pale and covered
+with a cold sweat.  From wondering how they could get away, Bassett
+began to wonder whether they would get away at all.  The sleep was
+more like a stupor than sleep.  He sat down by the bed, closer to
+sheer fright than he had ever been before, and wretched with the
+miserable knowledge of his own responsibility.
+
+As the afternoon wore on, it became increasingly evident that
+somehow or other he must get a doctor.  He turned the subject over
+in his mind, pro and con.  If he could get a new man, one who did
+not remember Jud Clark, it might do.  But he hesitated until, at
+seven, Dick opened his eyes and clearly did not know him.  Then
+he knew that the matter was out of his hands, and that from now
+on whatever it was that controlled the affairs of men, David's God
+or his own vague Providence, was in charge.
+
+He got his hat and went out, and down the stairs again.  Wilkins
+had disappeared, but Bill still stood by the entrance, watching the
+crowd that drifted in and out.  In his state of tension he felt
+that the hotel clerk's eyes were suspicious as he retained the two
+rooms for another day, and that Bill watched him out with more than
+casual interest.  Even the matter of cancelling the order for the
+car loomed large and suspicion-breeding before him, but he
+accomplished it, and then set out to find medical assistance.
+
+There, however, chance favored him.  The first doctor's sign led
+him to a young man, new to the town, and obviously at leisure.  Not
+that he found that out at once.  He invented a condition for
+himself, as he had done once before, got a prescription and paid
+for it, learned what he wanted, and then mentioned Dick.  He was
+careful to emphasize his name and profession, and his standing
+"back home."
+
+"I'll admit he's got me worried," he finished.  "He saw me registered
+and came to my room this morning to see me, and got sick there.  That
+is, he said he had a violent headache and was dizzy.  I got him to
+his room and on the bed, and he's been sleeping ever since.  He looks
+pretty sick to me."
+
+He was conscious of Bill's eyes on him as they went through the
+lobby again, but he realized now that they were unsuspicious.
+Bassett himself was in a hot sweat.  He stopped outside the room
+and mopped his face.
+
+"Look kind of shot up yourself," the doctor commented.  "Watch this
+sun out here.  Because it's dry here you Eastern people don't
+notice the heat until it plays the deuce with you."
+
+He made a careful examination of the sleeping man, while Bassett
+watched his face.
+
+"Been a drinking man?  Or do you know?"
+
+"No.  But I think not.  I gave him a small drink this morning, when
+he seemed to need it."
+
+"Been like this all day?"
+
+"Since noon.  Yes."
+
+Once more the medical man stooped.  When he straightened it was to
+deliver Bassett a body blow.
+
+"I don't like his condition, or that twitching.  If these were the
+good old days in Wyoming I'd say he is on the verge of delirium
+tremens.  But that's only snap judgment.  He might be on the verge
+of a good many things.  Anyhow, he'd better be moved to the
+hospital.  This is no place for him."
+
+And against this common-sense suggestion Bassett had nothing to
+offer.  If the doctor had been looking he would have seen him make
+a gesture of despair.
+
+"I suppose so," he said, dully.  "Is it near? I'll go myself and
+get a room."
+
+"That's my advice.  I'll look in later, and if the stupor continues
+I'll have in a consultant."  He picked up his bag and stood looking
+down at the bed.  "Big fine-looking chap, isn't he?" he commented.
+"Married?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, we'll get the ambulance, and later on we'll go over him
+properly.  I'd call a maid to sit with him, if I were you."  In the
+grip of a situation that was too much for him, Bassett rang the
+bell.  It was answered by the elderly maid who took care of his
+own bedroom.
+
+Months later, puzzling over the situation, Bassett was to wonder,
+and not to know, whether chance or design brought the Thorwald
+woman to the door that night.  At the time, and for weeks, he laid
+it to tragic chance, the same chance which had placed in Dick's
+hand the warning letter that had brought him West.  But as months
+went on, the part played in the tragedy by that faded woman with
+her tired dispirited voice and her ash colored hair streaked with
+gray, assumed other proportions, loomed large and mysterious.
+
+There were times when he wished that some prescience of danger had
+made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised
+her shrill, alarming voice!  But he had no warning.  All he saw was
+a woman in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron,
+raising incurious eyes to his.
+
+"I suppose it's all right if she sits in the hall?"  Bassett
+inquired, still fighting his losing fight.  "She can go in if he
+stirs."
+
+"Right-o," said the doctor, who had been to France and had brought
+home some British phrases.
+
+Bassett walked back from the hospital alone.  The game was up and
+he knew it.  Sooner or later-- In a way he tried to defend himself
+to himself.  He had done his best.  Two or three days ago he would
+have been exultant over the developments.  After all, mince things
+as one would, Clark was a murderer.  Other men killed and paid the
+penalty.  And the game was not up entirely, at that.  The providence
+which had watched over him for so long might continue to.  The
+hospital was new.  (It was, ironically enough, the Clark Memorial
+hospital.) There was still a chance.
+
+He was conscious of something strange as he entered the lobby.
+The constable was gone, and there was no clerk behind the desk.
+At the foot of the stairs stood a group of guests and loungers,
+looking up, while a bell-boy barred the way.
+
+Even then Bassett's first thought was of fire.  He elbowed his way
+to the foot of the stairs, and demanded to be allowed to go up, but
+he was refused.
+
+"In a few minutes," said the boy.  "No need of excitement."
+
+"Is it a fire?"
+
+"I don't know myself.  I've got my orders.  That's all."  Wilkins
+came hurrying in.  The crowd, silent and respectful before the law,
+opened to let him through and closed behind him.
+
+Bassett stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+To Elizabeth the first days of Dick's absence were unbelievably
+dreary.  She seemed to live only from one visit of the postman to
+the next.  She felt sometimes that only  part of her was at home
+in the Wheeler house, slept at night in her white bed, donned its
+black frocks and took them off, and made those sad daily
+pilgrimages to the cemetery above the town, where her mother tidied
+with tender hands the long narrow mound, so fearfully remindful of
+Jim's tall slim body.
+
+That part of her grieved sorely, and spent itself in small
+comforting actions and little caressing touches on bowed heads and
+grief-stooped shoulders.  It put away Jim's clothing, and kept
+immaculate the room where now her mother spent most of her waking
+hours.  It sent her on her knees at night to pray for Jim's
+happiness in some young-man heaven which would please him.  But the
+other part of her was not there at all.  It was off with Dick in some
+mysterious place of mountains and vast distance called Wyoming.
+
+And because of this division in herself, because she felt that her
+loyalty to her people had wavered, because she knew that already
+she had forsaken her father and her mother and would follow her
+love through the rest of her life, she was touchingly anxious to
+comfort and to please them.
+
+"She's taking Dick's absence very hard," Mrs. Wheeler said one
+night, when she had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed.  "She
+worries me sometimes."
+
+Mr. Wheeler sighed.  Why was it that a man could not tell his
+children what he had learned,--that nothing was so great as one
+expected; that love was worth living for, but not dying for.  The
+impatience of youth for life!  It had killed Jim.  It was hurting
+Nina.  It would all come, all come, in God's good time.  The young
+did not live to-day, but always to-morrow.  There seemed no time
+to live to-day, for any one.  First one looked ahead and said, "I
+will be so happy." And before one knew it one was looking back and
+saying: "I was so happy."
+
+"She'll be all right," he said aloud.
+
+He got up and whistled for the dog.
+
+"I'll take him around the block before I lock up," he said heavily.
+He bent over and kissed his wife.  She was a sad figure to him in
+her black dress.  He did not say to her what he thought sometimes;
+that Jim had been saved a great deal.  That to live on, and to lose
+the things one loved, one by one, was harder than to go quickly,
+from a joyous youth.
+
+He had not told her what he knew about Jim's companion that night.
+She would never have understood.  In her simple and child-like
+faith she knew that her boy sat that day among the blessed company
+of heaven.  He himself believed that Jim had gone forgiven into
+whatever lay behind the veil we call death, had gone shriven and
+clean before the Judge who knew the urge of youth and life.  He
+did not fear for Jim.  He only missed him.
+
+He walked around the block that night, a stooped commonplace figure,
+the dog at his heels.  Now and then he spoke to him, for
+companionship.  At the corner he stopped and looked along the side
+street toward the Livingstone house.  And as he looked he sighed.
+Jim and Nina, and now Elizabeth.  Jim and Nina were beyond his care
+now.  He could do no more.  But what could he do for Elizabeth?
+That, too, wasn't that beyond him?  He stood still, facing the
+tragedy of his helplessness, beset by vague apprehensions.  Then
+he went on doggedly, his hands clasped behind him, his head sunk
+on his breast.
+
+He lay awake for a long time that night, wondering whether he and
+Dick had been quite fair to Elizabeth.  She should, he thought,
+have been told.  Then, if Dick's apprehensions were justified, she
+would have had some preparation.  As it was-- Suppose something
+turned up out there, something that would break her heart?
+
+He had thought Margaret was sleeping, but after a time she moved
+and slipped her hand into his.  It comforted him.  That, too, was
+life.  Very soon now they would be alone together again, as in the
+early days before the children came.  All the years and the
+struggle, and then back where they started.  But still, thank God,
+hand in hand.
+
+Ever since the night of Jim's death Mrs. Sayre had been a constant
+visitor to the house.  She came in, solid, practical, and with an
+everyday manner neither forcedly cheerful nor too decorously
+mournful, which made her very welcome.  After the three first days,
+when she had practically lived at the house, there was no necessity
+for small pretensions with her.  She knew the china closet and the
+pantry, and the kitchen.  She had even penetrated to Mr. Wheeler's
+shabby old den on the second floor, and had slept a part of the
+first night there on the leather couch with broken springs which
+he kept because it fitted his body.
+
+She was a kindly woman, and she had ached with pity.  And, because
+of her usual detachment from the town and its affairs, the feeling
+that she was being of service gave her a little glow of content.
+She liked the family, too, and particularly she liked Elizabeth.
+But after she had seen Dick and Elizabeth together once or twice
+she felt that no plan she might make for Wallace could possibly
+succeed.  Lying on the old leather couch that first night, between
+her frequent excursions among the waking family, she had thought
+that out and abandoned it.
+
+But, during the days that followed the funeral, she was increasingly
+anxious about Wallace.  She knew that rumors of the engagement had
+reached him, for he was restless and irritable.  He did not care to
+go out, but wandered about the house or until late at night sat
+smoking alone on the terrace, looking down at the town with sunken,
+unhappy eyes.  Once or twice in the evening he had taken his car
+and started out, and lying awake in her French bed she would hear
+him coming hours later.  In the mornings his eyes were suffused and
+his color bad, and she knew that he was drinking in order to get
+to sleep.
+
+On the third day after Dick's departure for the West she got up
+when she heard him coming in, and putting on her dressing gown and
+slippers, knocked at his door.
+
+"Come in," he called ungraciously.
+
+She found him with his coat off, standing half defiantly with a
+glass of whisky and soda in his hand.  She went up to him and
+took it from him.
+
+"We've had enough of that in the family, Wallie," she said.  "And
+it's a pretty poor resource in time of trouble."
+
+"I'll have that back, if you don't mind."
+
+"Nonsense," she said briskly, and flung it, glass and all, out of
+the window.  She was rather impressive when she turned.
+
+"I've been a fairly indulgent mother," she said.  "I've let you
+alone, because it's a Sayre trait to run away when they feel a
+pull on the bit.  But there's a limit to my patience, and it is
+reached when my son drinks to forget a girl."
+
+He flushed and glowered at her in somber silence, but she moved
+about the room calmly, giving it a housekeeper's critical
+inspection, and apparently unconscious of his anger.
+
+"I don't believe you ever cared for any one in all your life," he
+said roughly.  "If you had, you would know."
+
+She was straightening a picture over the mantel, and she completed
+her work before she turned.
+
+"I care for you."
+
+"That's different."
+
+"Very well, then.  I cared for your father.  I cared terribly.  And
+he killed my love."
+
+She padded out of the room, her heavy square body in its blazing
+kimono a trifle rigid, but her face still and calm.  He remained
+staring at the door when she had closed it, and for some time after.
+He knew what message for him had lain behind that emotionless
+speech of hers, not only understanding, but a warning.  She had
+cared terribly, and his father had killed that love.  He had drunk
+and played through his gay young life, and then he had died, and
+no one had greatly mourned him.
+
+She had left the decanter on its stand, and he made a movement
+toward it.  Then, with a half smile, he picked it up and walked to
+the window with it.  He was still smiling, half boyishly, as he put
+out his light and got into bed.  It had occurred to him that the
+milkman's flivver, driving in at the break of dawn, would encounter
+considerable glass.
+
+By morning, after a bad night, he had made a sort of double-headed
+resolution, that he was through with booze, as he termed it, and
+that he would find out how he stood with Elizabeth.  But for a day
+or two no opportunity presented itself.  When he called there was
+always present some grave-faced sympathizing visitor, dark clad
+and low of voice, and over the drawing-room would hang the
+indescribable hush of a house in mourning.  It seemed to touch
+Elizabeth, too, making her remote and beyond earthly things.  He
+would go in, burning with impatience, hungry for the mere sight of
+her, fairly overcharged with emotion, only to face that strange new
+spirituality that made him ashamed of the fleshly urge in him.
+
+Once he found Clare Rossiter there, and was aware of something
+electric in the air.  After a time he identified it.  Behind the
+Rossiter girl's soft voice and sympathetic words, there was a
+veiled hostility.  She was watching Elizabeth, was overconscious
+of her.  And she was, for some reason, playing up to himself.  He
+thought he saw a faint look of relief on Elizabeth's face when
+Clare at last rose to go.
+
+"I'm on my way to see the man Dick Livingstone left in his place,"
+Clare said, adjusting her veil at the mirror.  "I've got a cold.
+Isn't it queer, the way the whole Livingstone connection is
+broken up?"
+
+"Hardly queer.  And it's only temporary."
+
+"Possibly.  But if you ask me, I don't believe Dick will come back.
+Mind, I don't defend the town, but it doesn't like to be fooled.
+And he's fooled it for years.  I know a lot of people who'd quit
+going to him."  She turned to Wallie.
+
+"He isn't David's nephew, you know.  The question is, who is he?
+Of course I don't say it, but a good many are saying that when a
+man takes a false identity he has something to hide."
+
+She gave them no chance to reply, but sauntered out with her
+sex-conscious, half-sensuous walk.  Outside the door her smile
+faded, and her face was hard and bitter.  She might forget Dick
+Livingstone, but never would she forgive herself for her confession
+to Elizabeth, nor Elizabeth for having heard it.
+
+Wallie turned to Elizabeth when she had gone, slightly bewildered.
+
+"What's got into her?" he inquired.  And then, seeing Elizabeth's
+white face, rather shrewdly:  "That was one for him and two for
+you, was it?"
+
+"I don't know.  Probably."
+
+"I wonder if you would look like that if any one attacked me!"
+
+"No one attacks you, Wallie."
+
+"That's not an answer.  You wouldn't, would you? It's different,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Yes.  A little."
+
+He straightened, and looked past her, unseeing, at the wall.  "I
+guess I've known it for quite a while," he said at last.  "I didn't
+want to believe it, so I wouldn't.  Are you engaged to him?"
+
+"Yes.  It's not to be known just yet, Wallie."
+
+"He's a good fellow," he said, after rather a long silence.  "Not
+that that makes it easier," he added with a twisted smile.  Then,
+boyishly and unexpectedly he said, "Oh, my God!"
+
+He sat down, and when the dog came and placed a head on his knee
+he patted it absently.  He wanted to go, but he had a queer feeling
+that when he went he went for good.
+
+"I've cared for you for years," he said.  "I've been a poor lot,
+but I'd have been a good bit worse, except for you."
+
+And again:
+
+"Only last night I made up my mind that if you'd have me, I'd make
+something out of myself.  I suppose a man's pretty weak when he
+puts a responsibility like that on a girl."
+
+She yearned over him, rather.  She made little tentative overtures
+of friendship and affection.  But he scarcely seemed to hear them,
+wrapped as he was in the selfish absorption of his disappointment.
+When she heard the postman outside and went to the door for the
+mail, she thought he had not noticed her going.  But when she
+returned he was watching her with jealous, almost tragic eyes.
+
+"I suppose you hear from him by every mail."
+
+"There has been nothing to-day."
+
+Something in her voice or her face made him look at her closely.
+
+"Has he written at all?"
+
+"The first day he got there.  Not since."
+
+He went away soon, and not after all with the feeling of going for
+good.  In his sceptical young mind, fed by Clare's malice, was
+growing a comforting doubt of Dick's good faith.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+When Wilkins had disappeared around the angle of the  staircase
+Bassett went to a chair and sat down.  He felt sick, and his knees
+were trembling.  Something had happened, a search for Clark room
+by room perhaps, and the discovery had been made.
+
+He was totally unable to think or to plan.  With Dick well they
+could perhaps have made a run for it.  The fire-escape stood ready.
+But as things were-- The murmuring among the crowd at the foot of
+the stairs ceased, and he looked up.  Wilkins was on the staircase,
+searching the lobby with his eyes.  When he saw Bassett he came
+quickly down and confronted him, his face angry and suspicious.
+
+"You're mixed up in this somehow," he said sharply.  "You might as
+well come over with the story.  We'll get him.  He can't get out
+of this town."
+
+With the words, and the knowledge that in some incredible fashion
+Dick had made his escape, Bassett's mind reacted instantly.
+
+"What's eating you, Wilkins?" he demanded.  "Who got away? I
+couldn't get that tongue-tied bell-hop to tell me.  Thought it
+was a fire."
+
+"Don't stall, Bassett.  You've had Jud Clark hidden upstairs in
+three-twenty all day."
+
+Bassett got up and towered angrily over the sheriff.  The crowd had
+turned and was watching.
+
+"In three-twenty?" he said.  "You're crazy.  Jud Clark!  Let me
+tell you something.  I don't know what you've got in your head, but
+three-twenty is a Doctor Livingstone from near my home town.  Well
+known and highly respected, too.  What's more, he's a sick man, and
+if he's got away, as you say, it's because he is delirious.  I had
+a doctor in to see him an hour ago.  I've just arranged for a room
+at the hospital for him.  Does that look as though I've been
+hiding him?"
+
+The positiveness of his identification and his indignation resulted
+in a change in Wilkins' manner.
+
+"I'll ask you to stay here until I come back."  His tone was
+official, but less suspicious.  "We'll have him in a half hour.
+It's Clark all right.  I'm not saying you knew it was Clark, but I
+want to ask you some questions."
+
+He went out, and Bassett heard him shouting an order in the street.
+He went to the street door, and realized that a search was going on,
+both by the police and by unofficial volunteers.  Men on horseback
+clattered by to guard the borders of the town, and in the vicinity
+of the hotel searchers were investigating yards and alleyways.
+
+Bassett himself was helpless.  He stood by, watching the fire of
+his own igniting, conscious of the curious scrutiny of the few hotel
+loungers who remained, and expecting momentarily to hear of Dick's
+capture.  It must come eventually, he felt sure.  As to how Dick
+had been identified, or by what means he had escaped, he was in
+complete ignorance; and an endeavor to learn by establishing the
+former entente cordiale between the room clerk and himself was met
+by a suspicious glance and what amounted to a snub.  He went back
+to his chair against the wall and sat there, waiting for the end.
+
+It was an hour before the sheriff returned, and he came in scowling.
+
+"I'll see you now," he said briefly, and led the way back to the
+hotel office behind the desk.  Bassett's last hope died when he saw
+sitting there, pale but composed, the elderly maid.  The sheriff
+lost no time.
+
+"Now I'll tell you what we know about your connection with this
+case, Bassett," he said.  "You engaged a car to take you both to
+the main line to-night.  You paid off Clark's room as well as your
+own this afternoon.  When you found he was sick you canceled your
+going.  That's true, isn't it?"
+
+"It is.  I've told you I knew him at home, but not as Clark."
+
+"I'll let that go.  You intended to take the midnight on the main
+line, but you ordered a car instead of using the branch road."
+
+"Livingstone was sick.  I thought it would be easier.  That's all."
+His voice sharpened.  "You can't drag me into this, Sheriff.  In
+the first place I don't believe it was Clark, or he wouldn't have
+come here, of all places on the earth.  I didn't even know he was
+here, until he came into my room this morning."
+
+"Why did he come into your room?"
+
+"He had seen that I was registered.  He said he felt sick.  I took
+him back and put him to bed.  To-night I got a doctor."
+
+The sheriff felt in his pocket and produced a piece of paper.
+Bassett's morale was almost destroyed when he saw that it was
+Gregory's letter to David.
+
+"I'll ask you to explain this.  It was on Clark's bed."
+
+Bassett took it and read it slowly.  He was thinking hard.
+
+"I see," he said.  "Well, that explains why he came here.  He was
+too sick to talk when I saw him.  You see, this is not addressed
+to him, but to his uncle, David Livingstone.  David Livingstone is
+a brother of Henry Livingstone, who died some years ago at Dry
+River.  This refers to a personal matter connected with the
+Livingstone estate."
+
+The sheriff took the letter and reread it.  He was puzzled.
+
+"You're a good talker," he acknowledged grudgingly.  He turned to
+the maid.
+
+"All right, Hattie," he said.  "We'll have that story again.  But
+just a minute." He turned to the reporter.  "Mrs. Thorwald here
+hasn't seen Lizzie Lazarus, the squaw.  Lizzie has been sitting in
+my office ever since noon.  Now, Hattie."
+
+Hattie moistened her dry lips.
+
+"It was Jud Clark, all right," she said.  "I knew him all his life,
+off and on.  But I wish I hadn't screamed.  I don't believe he killed
+Lucas, and I never will.  I hope he gets away."
+
+She eyed the sheriff vindictively, but he only smiled grimly.
+
+"What did I tell you?" he said to Bassett.  "Hell with the women
+--that was Jud Clark.  And we'll get him, Hattie.  Don't worry.
+Go on."
+
+She looked at Bassett.
+
+"When you left me, I sat outside the door, as you said.  Then I
+heard him moving, and I went in.  The room was not very light, and
+I didn't know him at first.  He sat up in bed and looked at me, and
+he said, 'Why, hello, Hattie Thorwald.' That's my name.  I married
+a Swede.  Then he looked again, and he said, 'Excuse me, I thought
+you were a Mrs. Thorwald, but I see now you're older.' I recognized
+him then, and I thought I was going to faint.  I knew he'd be
+arrested the moment it was known he was here.  I said, 'Lie down,
+Mr. Jud.  You're not very well.'  And I closed the door and locked
+it.  I was scared."
+
+Her voice broke; she fumbled for a handkerchief.  The sheriff
+glanced at Bassett.
+
+"Now where's your Livingstone story?" he demanded.  "All right,
+Hattie.  Let's have it."
+
+"I said, 'For God's sake, Mr. Jud, lie still, until I think what
+to do.  The sheriff's likely downstairs this very minute.' And then
+he went queer and wild.  He jumped off the bed and stood listening
+and staring, and shaking all over.  'I've got to get away,' he said,
+very loud.  'I won't let them take me.  I'll kill myself first!'
+When I put my hand on his arm he threw it off, and he made for the
+door.  I saw then that he was delirious with fever, and I stood in
+front of the door and begged him not to go out.  But he threw me
+away so hard that that I fell, and I screamed."
+
+"And then what?"
+
+"That's all.  If I hadn't been almost out of my mind I'd never have
+told that it was Jud Clark.  That'll hang on me dying day."
+
+An hour or so later Bassett went back to his room in a state of
+mental and nervous exhaustion.  He knew that from that time on he
+would be under suspicion and probably under espionage, and he
+proceeded methodically, his door locked, to go over his papers.
+His notebook and the cuttings from old files relative to the Clark
+case he burned in his wash basin and then carefully washed the
+basin.  That done, his attendance on a sick man, and the letter
+found on the bed was all the positive evidence they had to connect
+him with the case.  He had had some thought of slipping out by the
+fire-escape and making a search for Dick on his own account, but
+his lack of familiarity with his surroundings made that practically
+useless.
+
+At midnight he stretched out on his bed without undressing, and
+went over the situation carefully.  He knew nothing of the various
+neuroses which affect the human mind, but he had a vague impression
+that memory when lost did eventually return, and Dick's recognition
+of the chambermaid pointed to such a return.  He wondered what a
+man would feel under such conditions, what he would think.  He
+could not do it.  He abandoned the effort finally, and lay frowning
+at the ceiling while he considered his own part in the catastrophe.
+He saw himself, following his training and his instinct, leading
+the inevitable march toward this night's tragedy, planning, scheming,
+searching, and now that it had come, lying helpless on his bed while
+the procession of events went on past him and beyond his control.
+
+When an automobile engine back-fired in the street below he went
+sick with fear.
+
+He made the resolution then that was to be the guiding motive for
+his life for the next few months, to fight the thing of his own
+creating to a finish.  But with the resolution newly made he saw
+the futility of it.  He might fight, would fight, but nothing could
+restore to Dick Livingstone the place he had made for himself in
+the world.  He might be saved from his past, but he could not be
+given a future.
+
+All at once he was aware that some one was working stealthily at
+the lock of the door which communicated with a room beyond.  He
+slid cautiously off the bed and went to the light switch, standing
+with a hand on it, and waited.  The wild thought that it might be
+Livingstone was uppermost in his mind, and when the door creaked
+open and closed again, that was the word he breathed into the
+darkness.
+
+"No," said a woman's voice in a whisper.  "It's the maid, Hattie.
+Be careful.  There's a guard at the top of the stairs."
+
+He heard her moving to his outer door, and he knew that she stood
+there, listening, her head against the panel.  When she was
+satisfied she slipped, with the swiftness of familiarity with her
+surroundings, to the stand beside his bed, and turned on the lamp.
+In the shaded light he saw that she wore a dark cape, with its
+hood drawn over her head.  In some strange fashion the maid, even
+the woman, was lost, and she stood, strange, mysterious, and
+dramatic in the little room.
+
+"If you found Jud Clark, what would you do with him?"  she demanded.
+From beneath the hood her eyes searched his face.  "Turn him over
+to Wilkins and his outfit?"
+
+"I think you know better than that."
+
+"Have you got any plan?"
+
+"Plan?  No.  They've got every outlet closed, haven't they?  Do
+you know where he is?"
+
+"I know where he isn't, or they'd have him by now.  And I know Jud
+Clark.  He'd take to the mountains, same as he did before.  He's
+got a good horse."
+
+"A horse!"
+
+"Listen.  I haven't told this, and I don't mean to.  They'll learn
+it in a couple of hours, anyhow.  He got out by a back fire-escape
+--they know that.  But they don't know he took Ed Rickett's black
+mare.  They think he's on foot.  I've been down there now, and she's
+gone.  Ed's shut up in a room on the top floor, playing poker.  They
+won't break up until about three o'clock and he'll miss his horse
+then.  That's two hours yet."
+
+Bassett tried to see her face in the shadow of the hood.  He was
+puzzled and suspicious at her change of front, more than half
+afraid of a trap.
+
+"How do I know you are not working with Wilkins?" he demanded.  "You
+could have saved the situation to-night by saying you weren't sure."
+
+"I was upset.  I've had time to think since."
+
+He was forced to trust her, eventually, although the sense of some
+hidden motive, some urge greater than compassion, persisted in him.
+
+"You've got some sort of plan for me, then? I can't follow him
+haphazard into the mountains at night, and expect to find him."
+
+"Yes.  He was delirious when he left.  That thing about the sheriff
+being after him--he wasn't after him then.  Not until I gave the
+alarm.  He's delirious, and he thinks he's back to the night he
+--you know.  Wouldn't he do the same thing again, and make for the
+mountains and the cabin?  He went to the cabin before."
+
+Bassett looked at his watch.  It was half past twelve.
+
+"Even if I could get a horse I couldn't get out of the town."
+
+"You might, on foot.  They'll be trailing Rickett's horse by dawn.
+And if you can get out of town I can get you a horse.  I can get
+you out, too, I think.  I know every foot of the place."
+
+A feeling of theatrical unreality was Bassett's chief emotion
+during the trying time that followed.  The cloaked and shrouded
+figure of the woman ahead, the passage through two dark and empty
+rooms by pass key to an unguarded corridor in the rear, the descent
+of the fire-escape, where they stood flattened against the wall
+while a man, possibly one of the posse, rode in, tied his horse and
+stamped in high heeled boots into the building, and always just
+ahead the sure movement and silent tread of the woman, kept his
+nerves taut and increased his feeling of the unreal.
+
+At the foot of the fire-escape the woman slid out of sight
+noiselessly, but under Bassett's feet a tin can rolled and
+clattered.  Then a horse snorted close to his shoulder, and he was
+frozen with fright.  After that she gave him her hand, and led him
+through an empty outbuilding and another yard into a street.
+
+At two o'clock that morning Bassett, waiting in a lonely road near
+what he judged to be the camp of a drilling crew, heard a horse
+coming toward him and snorting nervously as it came and drew back
+into the shadows until he recognized the shrouded silhouette
+leading him.
+
+"It belongs to my son," she said.  "I'll fix it with him to-morrow.
+But if you're caught you'll have to say you came out and took him,
+or you'll get us all in trouble."
+
+She gave him careful instructions as to how to find the trail, and
+urged him to haste.
+
+"If you get him," she advised, "better keep right on over the range."
+
+He paused, with his foot in the stirrup.
+
+"You seem pretty certain he's taken to the mountains."
+
+"It's your only chance.  They'll get him anywhere else."
+
+He mounted and prepared to ride off.  He would have shaken hands
+with her, but the horse was still terrified at her shrouded figure
+and veered and snorted when she approached.  "However it turns out,"
+he said, "you've done your best, and I'm grateful."
+
+The horse moved off and left her standing there, her cowl drawn
+forward and her hands crossed on her breast.  She stood for a
+moment, facing toward the mountains, oddly monkish in outline and
+posture.  Then she turned back toward the town.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+Dick had picked up life again where he had left it off so long
+before.  Gone was David's house built on the sands of forgetfulness.
+Gone was David himself, and Lucy.  Gone not even born into his
+consciousness was Elizabeth.  The war, his work, his new place in
+the world, were all obliterated, drowned in the flood of memories
+revived by the shock of Bassett's revelations.
+
+Not that the breaking point had revealed itself as such at once.
+There was confusion first, then stupor and unconsciousness, and out
+of that, sharply and clearly, came memory.  It was not ten years
+ago, but an hour ago, a minute ago, that he had stood staring at
+Howard Lucas on the floor of the billiard room, and had seen
+Beverly run in through the door.
+
+"Bev!" he was saying.  "Bev!  Don't look like that!"
+
+He moved and found he was in bed.  It had been a dream.  He drew a
+long breath, looked about the room, saw the woman and greeted her.
+But already he knew he had not been dreaming.  Things were
+sharpening in his mind.  He shuddered and looked at the floor, but
+nobody lay there.  Only the horror in his mind, and the instinct
+to get away from it.  He was not thinking at all, but rising in him
+was not only the need for flight, but the sense of pursuit.  They
+were after him.  They would get him.  They must never get him alive.
+
+Instinct and will took the place of thought, and whatever closed
+chamber in his brain had opened, it clearly influenced his physical
+condition.  He bore all the stigmata of prolonged and heavy
+drinking; his nerves were gone; he twitched and shook.  When he
+got down the fire-escape his legs would scarcely hold him.
+
+The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and
+ready, fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.
+
+Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already
+familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing
+he had done before.  Only for a moment.  Then partial memory ceased,
+and he climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the
+mountains and the cabin.  By that strange quality of the brain which
+is called habit, although the habit be of only one emphatic
+precedent, he followed the route he had taken ten years before.
+How closely will never be known.  Did he stop at this turn to look
+back, as he had once before?  Did he let his horse breathe there?
+Not the latter, probably, for as, following the blind course that
+he had followed ten years before, he left the town and went up the
+canyon trail, he was riding as though all the devils of hell were
+behind him.
+
+One thing is certain.  The reproduction of the conditions of the
+earlier flight, the familiar associations of the trail, must have
+helped rather than hindered his fixation in the past.  Again he
+was Judson Clark, who had killed a man, and was flying from himself
+and from pursuit.
+
+Before long his horse was in acute distress, but he did not notice
+it.  At the top of the long climb the animal stopped, but he kicked
+him on recklessly.  He was as unaware of his own fatigue, or that
+he was swaying in the saddle, until galloping across a meadow the
+horse stumbled and threw him.
+
+He lay still for some time; not hurt but apparently lacking the
+initiative to get up again.  He had at that period the alternating
+lucidity and mental torpor of the half drunken man.  But struggling
+up through layers of blackness at last there came again the
+instinct for flight, and he got on the horse and set off.
+
+The torpor again overcame him and he slept in the saddle.  When the
+horse stopped he roused and kicked it on.  Once he came up through
+the blackness to the accompaniment of a great roaring, and found
+that the animal was saddle deep in a ford, and floundering badly
+among the rocks.  He turned its head upstream, and got it out safely.
+
+Toward dawn some of the confusion was gone, but he firmly fixed in
+the past.  The horse wandered on, head down, occasionally stopping
+to seize a leaf as it passed, and once to drink deeply at a spring.
+Dick was still not thinking--there was something that forbade him
+to think-but he was weak and emotional.  He muttered:
+
+"Poor Bev! Poor old Bev!"
+
+A great wave of tenderness and memory swept over him.  Poor Bev!
+He had made life hell for her, all right.  He had an almost
+uncontrollable impulse to turn the horse around, go back and see
+her once more.  He was gone anyhow.  They would get him.  And he
+wanted her to know that he would have died rather than do what
+he had done.
+
+The flight impulse died; he felt sick and very cold, and now and
+then he shook violently.  He began to watch the trail behind him
+for the pursuit, but without fear.  He seemed to have been wandering
+for a thousand black nights through deep gorges and over peaks as
+high as the stars, and now he wanted to rest, to stop somewhere and
+sleep, to be warm again.  Let them come and take him, anywhere out
+of this nightmare.
+
+With the dawn still gray he heard a horse behind and below him on
+the trail up the cliff face.  He stopped and sat waiting, twisted
+about in his saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet
+touchingly helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay.
+The horseman came into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a
+middle-aged man in a dark sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly
+incongruous figure and manifestly weary.  He rode bent forward,
+and now and again he raised his eyes from the trail and searched
+the wall above with bloodshot, anxious eyes.
+
+On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and
+spoke to him in a quiet voice.
+
+"Hello, old man," he said.  "I began to think I was going to miss
+you after all."
+
+His scrutiny of Dick's face had rather reassured him.  The delirium
+had passed, apparently.  Dishevelled although he was, covered with
+dust and with sweat from the horse, Livingstone's eyes were steady
+enough.  As he rode up to him, however, he was not so certain.  He
+found himself surveyed with a sort of cool malignity that startled
+him.
+
+"Miss me!" Livingstone sneered bitterly.  "With every damned hill
+covered by this time with your outfit!  I'll tell you this.  If I'd
+had a gun you'd never have got me alive."
+
+Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled.
+
+"My outfit!  I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the
+night to get you out of this mess."
+
+"God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess," Dick said somberly.
+
+It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face,
+and he rode closer.
+
+"See here, Livingstone," he said, in a soothing tone, "nobody's
+going to get you.  I'm here to keep them from getting you.  We've
+got a good start, but we'll have to keep moving."
+
+Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and
+his eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.
+
+"I don't know you," he said doggedly.  "And I've done all the
+running away I'm going to do.  You go back and tell Wilkins I'm
+here and to come and get me.  The sooner the better."  The sneer
+faded, and he turned on Bassett with a depth of tragedy in his eyes
+that frightened the reporter.  "My God," he said, "I killed a man
+last night! I can't go through life with that on me.  I'm done, I
+tell you."
+
+"Last night!"  Some faint comprehension began to dawn in Bassett's
+mind, a suspicion of the truth.  But there was no time to verify
+it.  He turned and carefully inspected the trail to where it came
+into sight at the opposite rim of the valley.  When he was satisfied
+that the pursuit was still well behind them he spoke again.
+
+"Pull yourself together, Livingstone," he said, rather sharply.
+"Think a bit.  You didn't kill anybody last night.  Now listen,"
+he added impressively.  "You are Livingstone, Doctor Richard
+Livingstone.  You stick to that, and think about it."
+
+But Dick was not listening, save to some bitter inner voice, for
+suddenly he turned his horse around on the trail.  "Get out of
+the way," he said, "I'm going back to give myself up."
+
+He would have done it, probably, would have crowded past Bassett
+on the narrow trail and headed back toward capture, but for his
+horse.  It balked and whirled on the ledge, but it would not pass
+Bassett.  Dick swore and kicked it, his face ugly and determined,
+but it refused sullenly.  He slid out of the saddle then and tried
+to drag it on, but he was suddenly weak and sick.  He staggered.
+Bassett was off his horse in a moment and caught him.  He eased
+him onto a boulder, and he sat there, his shoulders sagging and
+his whole body twitching.
+
+"Been drinking my head off," he said at last.  "If I had a drink
+now I'd straighten out."  He tried to sit up.  "That's what's the
+matter with me.  I'm funking, of course, but that's not all.  I'd
+give my soul for some whisky."'
+
+"I can get you a drink, if you'll come on about a mile," Bassett
+coaxed.  "At the cabin you and I talked about yesterday."
+
+"Now you're talking."  Dick made an effort and got to his feet,
+shaking off Bassett's assisting arm.  "For God's sake keep your
+hands off me," he said irritably.  "I've got a hangover, that's all."
+
+He got into his saddle without assistance and started off up the
+trail.  Bassett once more searched the valley, but it was empty
+save for a deer drinking at the stream far below.  He turned and
+followed.
+
+He was fairly hopeless by that time, what with Dick's unexpected
+resistance and the change in the man himself.  He was dealing with
+something he did not understand, and the hypothesis of delirium
+did not hold.  There was a sort of desperate sanity in Dick's eyes.
+That statement, now, about drinking his head off--he hadn't looked
+yesterday like a drinking man.  But now he did.  He was twitching,
+his hands shook.  On the rock his face had been covered with a cold
+sweat.  What was that the doctor yesterday had said about delirium
+tremens?  Suppose he collapsed?  That meant capture.
+
+He did not need to guide Dick to the cabin.  He turned off the
+trail himself, and Bassett, following, saw him dismount and survey
+the ruin with a puzzled face.  But he said nothing.  Bassett waiting
+outside to tie the horses came in to find him sitting on one of the
+dilapidated chairs, staring around, but all he said was:
+
+"Get me that drink, won't you? I'm going to pieces."  Bassett found
+his tin cup where he had left it on a shelf and poured out a small
+amount of whisky from his flask.
+
+"This is all we have," he explained.  "We'll have to go slow
+with it."
+
+It had an almost immediate effect.  The twitching grew less, and a
+faint color came into Dick's face.  He stood up and stretched
+himself.  "That's better," he said.  "I was all in.  I must have
+been riding that infernal horse for years."
+
+He wandered about while the reporter made a fire and set the coffee
+pot to boil.  Bassett, glancing up once, saw him surveying the
+ruined lean-to from the doorway, with an expression he could not
+understand.  But he did not say anything, nor did he speak again
+until Bassett called him to get some food.  Even then he was
+laconic, and he seemed to be listening and waiting.
+
+Once something startled the horses outside, and he sat up and
+listened.
+
+"They're here!" he said.
+
+"I don't think so," Bassett replied, and went to the doorway.  "No,"
+he called back over his shoulder, "you go on and finish.  I'll watch."
+
+"Come back and eat," Dick said surlily.
+
+He ate very little, but drank of the coffee.  Bassett too ate almost
+nothing.  He was pulling himself together for the struggle that was
+to come, marshaling his arguments for flight, and trying to fathom
+the extent of the change in the man across the small table.
+
+Dick put down his tin cup and got up.  He was strong again, and the
+nightmare confusion of the night had passed away.  Instead of it
+there was a desperate lucidity and a courage born of desperation.
+He remembered it all distinctly; he had killed Howard Lucas the
+night before.  Before long Wilkins or some of his outfit would ride
+up to the door, and take him back to Norada.  He was not afraid of
+that.  They would always think he had run away because he was afraid
+of capture, but it was not that.  He had run away from Bev's face.
+Only he had not got away from it.  It had been with him all night,
+and it was with him now.
+
+But he would have to go back.  He couldn't be caught like a rat in
+a trap.  The Clarks didn't run away.  They were fighters.  Only the
+Clarks didn't kill.  They fought, but they didn't murder.
+
+He picked up his hat and went to the door.
+
+"Well, you've been mighty kind, old man," he said.  "But I've got
+to go back.  I ran last night like a scared kid, but I'm through
+with that sort of foolishness."
+
+"I'd give a good bit," Bassett said, watching him, "to know what
+made you run last night.  You were safe where you were."
+
+"I don't know what you are talking about," Dick said drearily.  "I
+didn't run from them.  I ran to get away from something." He turned
+away irritably.  "You wouldn't understand.  Say I was drunk.  I
+was, for that matter.  I'm not over it yet."
+
+Bassett watched him.
+
+"I see," he said quietly.  "It was last night, was it, that this
+thing happened?"
+
+"You know it, don't you?"
+
+"And, after it happened, do you remember what followed?"
+
+"I've been riding all night.  I didn't care what happened.  I knew
+I'd run into a whale of a blizzard, but I--"
+
+He stopped and stared outside, to where the horses grazed in the
+upland meadow, knee deep in mountain flowers.  Bassett, watching
+him, saw the incredulity in his eyes, and spoke very gently.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said, "you are right.  Try to understand what
+I am saying, and take it easy.  You rode into a blizzard, right
+enough.  But that was not last night.  It was ten years ago."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+Had Bassett had some wider knowledge of Dick's condition he might
+have succeeded better during that bad hour that followed.
+Certainly, if he had hoped that the mere statement of fact and its
+proof would bring results, he failed.  And the need for haste, the
+fear of the pursuit behind them, made him nervous and incoherent.
+
+He had first to accept the incredible, himself--that Dick
+Livingstone no longer existed, that he had died and was buried deep
+in some chamber of an unconscious mind.  He made every effort to
+revive him, to restore him into the field of consciousness, but
+without result.  And his struggle was increased in difficulty by
+the fact that he knew so little of Dick's life.  David's name meant
+nothing, apparently, and it was the only name he knew.  He described
+the Livingstone house; he described Elizabeth as he had seen her
+that night at the theater.  Even Minnie.  But Dick only shook his
+head.  And until he had aroused some instinct, some desire to live,
+he could not combat Dick's intention to return and surrender.
+
+"I understand what you are saying," Dick would say.  "I'm trying to
+get it.  But it doesn't mean anything to me."
+
+He even tried the war.
+
+"War?  What war?" Dick asked.  And when he heard about it he groaned.
+
+"A war!" he said.  "And I've missed it!"
+
+But soon after that he got up, and moved to the door.
+
+"I'm going back," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"They're after me, aren't they?"
+
+"You're forgetting again.  Why should they be after you now, after
+ten years?"
+
+"I see.  I can't get it, you know.  I keep listening for them."
+
+Bassett too was listening, but he kept his fears to himself.
+
+"Why did you do it?" he asked finally.
+
+"I was drunk, and I hated him.  He married a girl I was crazy about."
+
+Bassett tried new tactics.  He stressed the absurdity of surrendering
+for a crime committed ten years before and forgotten.
+
+"They won't convict you anyhow," he urged.  "It was a quarrel, wasn't
+it?  I mean, you didn't deliberately shoot him?"
+
+"I don't remember.  We quarreled.  Yes.  I don't remember shooting him."
+
+"What do you remember?"
+
+Dick made an effort, although he was white to the lips.
+
+"I saw him on the floor," he said slowly, and staggered a little.
+
+"Then you don't even know you did it."
+
+"I hated him."
+
+But Bassett saw that his determination to surrender himself was
+weakening.  Bassett fought it with every argument he could summon,
+and at last he brought forward the one he felt might be conclusive.
+
+"You see, you've not only made a man's place in the world, Clark,
+as I've told you.  You've formed associations you can't get away
+from.  You've got to think of the Livingstones, and you told me
+yesterday a shock would kill the old man.  But it's more than that.
+There's a girl back in your town.  I think you were engaged to her."
+
+But if he had hoped to pierce the veil with that statement he
+failed.  Dick's face flushed, and he went to the door of the cabin,
+much as he had gone to the window the day before.  He did not look
+around when he spoke.
+
+"Then I'm an unconscionable cad," he said.  "I've only cared for
+one woman in my life.  And I've shipwrecked her for good."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"You know who I mean."
+
+Sometime later Bassett got on his horse and rode out to a ledge
+which commanded a long stretch of trail in the valley below.  Far
+away horsemen were riding along it, one behind the other, small
+dots that moved on slowly but steadily.  He turned and went back
+to the cabin.
+
+"We'd better be moving," he said, "and it's up to you to say where.
+You've got two choices.  You can go back to Norada and run the
+chance of arrest.  You know what that means.  Without much chance
+of a conviction you will stand trial and bring wretchedness to the
+people who stood by you before and who care for you now.  Or you
+can go on over the mountains with me and strike the railroad
+somewhere to the West.  You'll have time to think things over,
+anyhow.  They've waited ten years.  They can wait longer."
+
+To his relief Dick acquiesced.  He had become oddly passive; he
+seemed indeed not greatly interested.  He did not even notice the
+haste with which Bassett removed the evidences of their meal, or
+extinguished the dying fire and scattered the ashes.  Nor, when
+they were mounted, the care with which they avoided the trail.  He
+gave, when asked, information as to the direction of the railroad
+at the foot of the western slope of the range, and at the same
+instigation found a trail for them some miles beyond their starting
+point.  But mostly he merely followed, in a dead silence.
+
+They made slow progress.  Both horses were weary and hungry, and
+the going was often rough and even dangerous.  But for Dick's
+knowledge of the country they would have been hopelessly lost.
+Bassett, however, although tortured with muscular soreness, felt
+his spirits rising as the miles were covered, and there was no sign
+of the pursuit.
+
+By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let
+them graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became
+insistent.  Dick stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the
+reporter could not rest.  The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed
+him.  They had covered perhaps twenty miles since leaving the
+cabin, and the railroad was still sixty miles away.  With fresh
+horses they could have made it by dawn of the next morning, but he
+did not believe their jaded animals could go much farther.  The
+country grew worse instead of better.  A pass ahead, which they
+must cross, was full of snow.
+
+He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition.  The
+twitching was gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man
+exhausted and at his physical limit.  But the necessity of crossing
+the pass before nightfall or of waiting until dawn to do it drove
+Bassett back from an anxious reconnoitering of the trail at five
+o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man and start on again.
+
+Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.
+
+"Let me ahead, Bassett," he said peremptorily.  "And give your
+horse his head.  He'll take care of you if you give him a chance."
+
+Bassett was glad to fall back.  He was exhausted and nervous.  The
+trail frightened him.  It clung to the side of a rocky wall,
+twisting and turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of
+glacial water, and higher up it led over an ice field which was a
+glassy bridge over a rushing stream beneath.  To add to their
+wretchedness mosquitoes hung about them in voracious clouds, and
+tiny black gnats which got into their eyes and their nostrils and
+set the horses frantic.
+
+Once across the ice field Dick's horse fell and for a time could
+not get up again.  He lay, making ineffectual efforts to rise, his
+sides heaving, his eyes rolling in distress.  They gave up then,
+and prepared to make such camp as they could.
+
+With the setting of the sun it had grown bitterly cold, and Bassett
+was forced to light a fire.  He did it under the protection of the
+mountain wall, and Dick, after unsaddling his fallen horse, built
+a rough shelter of rocks against the wind.  After a time the
+exhausted horse got up, but there was no forage, and the two
+animals stood disconsolate, or made small hopeless excursions,
+noses to the ground, among the moss and scrub pines.
+
+Before turning in Bassett divided the remaining contents of the
+flask between them, and his last cigarettes.  Dick did not talk.
+He sat, his back to the shelter, facing the fire, his mind busy
+with what Bassett knew were bitter and conflicting thoughts.  Once,
+however, as the reporter was dozing off, Dick spoke.
+
+"You said I told you there was a girl," he said.  "Did I tell you
+her name?"
+
+"No."
+
+"All right.  Go to sleep.  I thought if I heard it it might help."
+
+Bassett lay back and watched him.
+
+"Better get some sleep, old man," he said.
+
+He dozed, to waken again cold and shivering.  The fire had burned
+low, and Dick was sitting near it, unheeding, and in a deep study.
+He looked up, and Bassett was shocked at the quiet tragedy in his face.
+
+"Where is Beverly Carlysle now?" he asked.  "Or do you know?"
+
+"Yes.  I saw her not long ago."
+
+"Is she married again?"
+
+"No.  She's revived 'The Valley,' and she's in New York with it."
+
+Dick slept for only an hour or so that night, but as he slept he
+dreamed.  In his dream he was at peace and happy, and there was a
+girl in a black frock who seemed to be a part of that peace.  When
+he roused, however, still with the warmth of his dream on him, he
+could not summon her.  She had slipped away among the shadows of
+the night.
+
+He sat by the fire in the grip of a great despair.  He had lost ten
+years out of his life, his best years.  And he could not go back to
+where he had left off.  There was nothing to go back to but shame and
+remorse.  He looked at Bassett, lying by the fire, and tried to fit
+him into the situation.  Who was he, and why was he here?  Why had
+he ridden out at night alone, into unknown mountains, to find him?
+
+As though his intent gaze had roused the sleeper, Bassett opened
+his eyes, at first drowsily, then wide awake.  He raised himself
+on his elbow and listened, as though for some far-off sound, and
+his face was strained and anxious.  But the night was silent, and
+he relaxed and slept again.
+
+Something that had been forming itself in Dick's mind suddenly
+crystallized into conviction.  He rose and walked to the edge of
+the mountain wall and stood there listening.  When he went back to
+the fire he felt in his pockets, found a small pad and pencil, and
+bending forward to catch the light, commenced to write...
+At dawn Bassett wakened.  He was stiff and wretched, and he grunted
+as he moved.  He turned over and surveyed the small plateau.  It
+was empty, except for his horse, making its continuous, hopeless
+search for grass.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+David was enjoying his holiday.  He lay in bed most of the morning,
+making the most of his one after-breakfast cigar and surrounded by
+newspaper and magazines.  He had made friends of the waiter who
+brought his breakfast, and of the little chambermaid who looked
+after his room, and such conversations as this would follow:
+
+"Well, Nellie," he would say, "and did you go to the dance on the
+pier last night?"
+
+"Oh, yes, doctor."
+
+"Your gentleman friend showed up all right, then?"
+
+"Oh, yes.  He didn't telephone because he was on a job out of town."
+
+Here perhaps David would lower his voice, for Lucy was never far
+away.
+
+"Did you wear the flowers?"
+
+"Yes, violets.  I put one away to remember you by.  It was funny
+at first.  I wouldn't tell him who gave them to me."
+
+David would chuckle delightedly.
+
+"That's right," he would say.  "Keep him guessing, the young rascal.
+We men are kittle cattle, Nellie, kittle cattle!"
+
+Even the valet unbent to him, and inquired if the doctor needed a
+man at home to look after him and his clothes.  David was
+enormously tickled.
+
+"Well," he said, with a twinkle in his eye.  "I'll tell you how I
+manage now, and then you'll see.  When I want my trousers pressed I
+send them downstairs and then I wait in my bathrobe until they come
+back.  I'm a trifle better off for boots, but you'd have to knock
+Mike, my hired man, unconscious before he'd let you touch them."
+
+The valet grinned understandingly.
+
+"Of course, there's my nephew," David went on, a little note of
+pride in his voice.  "He's become engaged recently, and I notice
+he's bought some clothes.  But still I don't think even he will
+want anybody to hold his trousers while he gets into them."
+
+David chuckled over that for a long time after the valet had gone.
+
+He was quite happy and contented.  He spent all afternoon in a
+roller chair, conversing affably with the man who pushed him, and
+now and then when Lucy was out of sight getting out and stretching
+his legs.  He picked up lost children and lonely dogs, and tried
+his eye in a shooting gallery, and had hard work keeping off the
+roller coasters and out of the sea.
+
+Then, one day, when he had been gone some time, he was astonished
+on entering his hotel to find Harrison Miller sitting in the lobby.
+David beamed with surprise and pleasure.
+
+"You old humbug!" he said.  "Off on a jaunt after all! And the
+contempt of you when I was shipped here!"
+
+Harrison Miller was constrained and uncomfortable.  He had meant
+to see Lucy first.  She was a sensible woman, and she would know
+just what David could stand, or could not.  But David did not
+notice his constraint; took him to his room, made him admire the
+ocean view, gave him a cigar, and then sat down across from him,
+beaming and hospitable.
+
+"Suffering Crimus, Miller," he said.  "I didn't know I was homesick
+until I saw you.  Well, how's everything?  Dick's letters haven't
+been much, and we haven't had any for several days."
+
+Harrison Miller cleared his throat.  He knew that David had not
+been told of Jim Wheeler's death, but that Lucy knew.  He knew too
+from Walter Wheeler that David did not know that Dick had gone west.
+Did Lucy know that, or not?  Probably yes.  But he considered the
+entire benevolent conspiracy an absurdity and a mistake.  It was
+making him uncomfortable, and most of his life had been devoted to
+being comfortable.
+
+He decided to temporize.
+
+"Things are about the same," he said.  "They're going to pave
+Chisholm Street.  And your Mike knocked down the night watchman
+last week.  I got him off with a fine."
+
+"I hope he hasn't been in my cellar.  He's got a weakness, but
+then--How's Dick?  Not overworking?"
+
+"No.  He's all right."
+
+But David was no man's fool.  He began to see something strange in
+Harrison's manner, and he bent forward in his chair.
+
+"Look here, Harrison," he said, "there's something the matter with
+you.  You've got something on your mind."
+
+"Well, I have and I haven't.  I'd like to see Lucy, David, if she's
+about."
+
+"Lucy's gadding.  You can tell me if you can her.  What is it?  Is
+it about Dick?"
+
+"In a way, yes."
+
+"He's not sick?"
+
+"No.  He's all right, as far as I know.  I guess I'd better tell
+you, David.  Walter Wheeler has got some sort of bee in his bonnet,
+and he got me to come on.  Dick was pretty tired and--well, one or
+two things happened to worry him.  One was that Jim Wheeler--you'll
+get this sooner or later--was in an automobile accident, and it
+did for him."
+
+David had lost some of his ruddy color.  It was a moment before he
+spoke.
+
+"Poor Jim," he said hoarsely.  "He was a good boy, only full of
+life.  It will be hard on the family."
+
+"Yes," Harrison Miller said simply.
+
+But David was resentful, too.  When his friends were in trouble he
+wanted to know about it.  He was somewhat indignant and not a little
+hurt.  But he soon reverted to Dick.
+
+"I'll go back and send him off for a rest," he said.  "I'm as good
+as I'll ever be, and the boy's tired.  What's the bee in Wheeler's
+bonnet?"
+
+"Look here, David, you know your own business best, and Wheeler
+didn't feel at liberty to tell me very much.  But he seemed to
+think you were the only one who could tell us certain things.  He'd
+have come himself, but it's not easy for him to leave the family
+just now.  Dick went away just after Jim's funeral.  He left a young
+chap named Reynolds in his place, and, I believe, in order not to
+worry you, some letters to be mailed at intervals."
+
+"Went where?" David asked, in a terrible voice.
+
+"To a town called Norada, in Wyoming.  Near his old home somewhere.
+And the Wheelers haven't heard anything from him since the day he
+got there.  That's three weeks ago.  He wrote Elizabeth the night
+he got there, and wired her at the same time.  There's been nothing
+since."
+
+David was gripping the arms of his chair with both hands, but he
+forced himself to calmness.
+
+"I'll go to Norada at once," he said.  "Get a time-table, Harrison,
+and ring for the valet."
+
+"Not on your life you won't.  I'm here to do that, when I've got
+something to go on.  Wheeler thought you might have heard from him.
+If you hadn't, I was to get all the information I could and then
+start.  Elizabeth's almost crazy.  We wired the chief of police
+of Norada yesterday."
+
+"Yes!" David said thickly.  "Trust your friends to make every
+damned mistake possible!  You've set the whole pack on his trail."
+And then he fell back in his chair, and gasped, "Open the window!"
+
+When Lucy came in, a half hour later, she found David on his bed
+with the hotel doctor beside him, and Harrison Miller in the room.
+David was fighting for breath, but he was conscious and very calm.
+He looked up at her and spoke slowly and distinctly.
+
+"They've got Dick, Lucy," he said.
+
+He looked aged and pinched, and entirely hopeless.  Even after his
+heart had quieted down and he lay still among his pillows, he gave
+no evidence of his old fighting spirit.  He lay with his eyes shut,
+relaxed and passive.  He had done his best, and he had failed.  It
+was out of his hands now, and in the hands of God.  Once, as he lay
+there, he prayed.  He said that he had failed, and that now he was
+too old and weak to fight.  That God would have to take it on, and
+do the best He could.  But he added that if God did not save Dick
+and bring him back to happiness, that he, David, was through.
+
+Toward morning he wakened from a light sleep.  The door into Lucy's
+room was open and a dim light was burning beyond it.  David called
+her, and by her immediate response he knew she had not been sleeping.
+
+"Yes, David," she said, and came padding in in her bedroom slippers
+and wadded dressing-gown, a tragic figure of apprehension,
+determinedly smiling.  "What do you want?"
+
+"Sit down, Lucy."
+
+When she had done so he put out his hand, fumbling for hers.  She
+was touched and alarmed, for it was a long while since there had
+been any open demonstration of affection between them.  David was
+silent for a time, absorbed in thought.  Then:
+
+"I'm not in very good shape, Lucy.  I suppose you know that.  This
+old pump of mine has sprung a leak or something.  I don't want you
+to worry if anything happens.  I've come to the time when I've got
+a good many over there, and it will be like going home."
+
+Lucy nodded.  Her chin quivered.  She smoothed his hand, with its
+high twisted veins.
+
+"I know, David," she said.  "Mother and father, and Henry, and a
+good many friends.  But I need you, too.  You're all I have, now
+that Dick--"
+
+"That's why I called you.  If I can get out there, I'll go.  And
+I'll put up a fight that will make them wish they'd never started
+anything.  But if I can't, if I--"  She felt his fingers tighten
+on her hand.  "If Hattie Thorwald is still living, we'll put her
+on the stand.  If I can't go, for any reason, I want you to see
+that she is called.  And you know where Henry's statement is?"
+
+"In your box, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes.  Have the statement read first, and then have her called to
+corroborate it.  Tell the story I have told you--or no, I'll
+dictate it to you in the morning, and sign it before witnesses.
+Jake and Bill will testify too."
+
+He felt easier in his mind after that.  He had marshalled his forces
+and begun his preparations for battle.  He felt less apprehension
+now in case he fell asleep, to waken among those he had loved long
+since and lost awhile.  After a few moments his eyes closed, and
+Lucy went back to her bed and crawled into it.
+
+It was, however, Harrison Miller who took the statement that morning.
+Lucy's cramped old hand wrote too slowly for David's impatience.
+Harrison Miller took it, on hotel stationery, covering the carefully
+numbered pages with his neat, copper-plate writing.  He wrote with
+an impassive face, but with intense interest, for by that time he
+knew Dick's story.
+
+Never, in his orderly bachelor life, of daily papers and a flower
+garden and political economy at night, had he been so close to the
+passions of men to love and hate and the disorder they brought
+with them.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+"My brother, Henry Livingstone, was not a strong man,"  David
+dictated.  "He had the same heart condition I have, but it
+developed earlier.  After he left college he went to Arizona and
+bought a ranch, and there he met and chummed with Elihu Clark,
+who had bought an old mine and was reworking it.  Henry loaned
+him a small amount of money at that time, and a number of years
+later in return for that, when Henry's health failed, Clark, who
+had grown wealthy, bought him a ranch in Wyoming at Dry River, not
+far from Clark's own property.
+
+"Henry had been teaching in an Eastern university, and then taken
+up tutoring.  We saw little of him.  He was a student, and he
+became almost a recluse.  I saw less of him than ever after Clark
+gave him the ranch.
+
+"In the spring of 1910 Henry wrote me that he was not well, and I
+went out to see him.  He seemed worried and was in bad shape
+physically.  Elihu Clark had died five years before, and left him
+a fair sum of money, fifty thousand dollars, but he was living in
+a way which made me think he was not using it.  The ranch buildings
+were dilapidated, and there was nothing but the barest necessities
+in the house.
+
+"I taxed Henry with miserliness, and he then told me that the money
+was not his, but left to him to be used for an illegitimate son of
+Clark's, born before his marriage, the child of a small rancher's
+daughter named Hattie Burgess.  The Burgess girl had gone to Omaha
+for its birth, and the story was not known.  In early years Clark
+had paid the child's board through his lawyer to an Omaha woman
+named Hines, and had later sent him to college.  The Burgess girl
+married a Swede named Thorwald.  The boy was eight years older than
+Judson, Clark's legitimate son.
+
+"After the death of his wife Elihu Clark began to think about the
+child, especially after Judson became a fair-sized boy.  He had
+the older boy, who went by the name of Hines, sent to college, and
+in summer he stayed at Henry's tutoring school.  Henry said the boy
+was like the Burgess family, blonde and excitable and rather
+commonplace.  He did not get on well at college, and did not
+graduate.  So far as he knew, Clark never saw him.
+
+"The boy himself believed that he was an orphan, and that the Hines
+woman had adopted him as a foundling.  But on the death of the
+woman he found that she had no estate, and that a firm of New York
+attorneys had been paying his college bills.
+
+"He had spent considerable time with Henry, one way and another,
+and he began to think that Henry knew who he was.  He thought at
+first that Henry was his father, and there was some trouble.  In
+order to end it Henry finally acknowledged that he knew who the
+father was, and after that he had no peace.  Clifton--his name
+was Clifton Hines--attacked Henry once, and if it had not been
+for the two men on the place he would have hurt him.
+
+"Henry began to give him money.  Clark had left the fifty thousand
+for the boy with the idea that Henry should start him in business
+with it.  But he only turned up wild-cat schemes that Henry would
+not listen to.  He did not know how Henry got the money, or from
+where.  He thought for a long time that Henry had saved it.
+
+"I'd better say here that Henry was fond of Clifton, although he
+didn't approve of him.  He'd never married, and the boy was like a
+son to him for a good many years.  He didn't have him at the
+ranch much, however, for he was a Burgess through and through and
+looked like them.  And he was always afraid that somehow the story
+would get out.
+
+"Then Clifton learned, somehow or other, of Clark's legacy to
+Henry, and he put two and two together.  There was a bad time, but
+Henry denied it and they went upstairs to bed.  That night Clifton
+broke into Henry's desk and found some letters from Elihu Clark
+that told the story.
+
+"He almost went crazy.  He took the papers up to Henry's and
+wakened him, standing over Henry with them in hand, and shaking
+all over.  I think they had a struggle, too.  All Henry told me
+was that he took them from him and threw them in the fire.
+
+"That was a year before Henry died, and at the time young Jud
+Clark's name was in all the newspapers.  He had left college after
+a wild career there, and although Elihu had tied up the property
+until Jud was twenty-one, Jud had his mother's estate and a big
+allowance.  Then, too, he borrowed on his prospects, and he lost
+a hundred thousand dollars at Monte Carlo within six weeks after
+he graduated.
+
+"One way and another he was always in the newspapers, and when he
+saw how Jud was throwing money away Clifton went wild.
+
+"As Henry had burned the letters he had no proofs.  He didn't know
+who his mother was, but he set to work to find out.  He ferreted
+into Elihu's past life, and he learned something about Hattie
+Burgess, or Thorwald.  She was married by that time, and lived on
+a little ranch near Norada.  He went to see her, and he accused
+her downright of being his mother.  It must have been a bad time
+for her, for after all he was her son, and she had to disclaim him.
+She had a husband and a boy by that husband, however, by that time,
+and she was desperate.  She threw him off the track somehow, lied
+and talked him down, and then went to bed in collapse.  She sent
+for Henry later and told him.
+
+"The queer thing was that as soon as she saw him she wanted him.
+He was her son.  She went to Henry one night, and said she had
+perjured her soul, and that she wanted him back.  She wasn't in
+love with Thorwald.  I think she'd always cared for Clark.  She
+went away finally, however, after promising Henry she would keep
+Clark's secret.  But I have a suspicion that later on she
+acknowledged the truth to the boy.
+
+"What he wanted, of course, was a share of the Clark estate.  Of
+course he hadn't a chance in law, but he saw a chance to blackmail
+young Jud Clark and he tried it.  Not personally, for he hadn't any
+real courage, but by mail.  Clark's attorneys wrote back saying
+they would jail him if he tried it again, and he went back to Dry
+River and after Henry again.
+
+"That was in the spring of 1911.  Henry was uneasy, for Clifton was
+not like himself.  He had spells of brooding, and he took to making
+long trips on his horse into the mountains, and coming in with the
+animal run to death.  Henry thought, too, that he was seeing the
+Thorwald woman, the mother.  Thorwald had died, and she was living
+with the son on their ranch and trying to sell it.  He thought
+Hines was trying to have her make a confession which would give him
+a hold on Jud Clark.
+
+"Henry was not well, and in the early fall he knew he hadn't long
+to live.  He wrote out the story and left it in his desk for me to
+read after he had gone, and as he added to it from time to time,
+when I got it it was almost up to date.
+
+"Judson came back to the Clark ranch in September, bringing along
+an actress named Beverly Carlysle, and her husband, Howard Lucas.
+There was considerable talk, because it was known Jud had been
+infatuated with the woman.  But no one saw much of the party,
+outside of the ranch.  The Carlysle woman seemed to be a lady, but
+the story was that both men were drinking a good bit, especially Jud.
+
+"Henry wrote that Hines had been in the East for some months at
+that time, and that he had not heard from him.  But he felt that
+it was only a truce, and that he would turn up again, hell bent
+for trouble.  He made a will and left the money to me, with
+instructions to turn it over to Hines.  It is still in the bank,
+and amounts to about thirty-five thousand dollars.  It is not mine,
+and I will not touch it.  But I have never located Clifton Hines.
+
+"In the last entry in his record I call attention to my brother's
+statement that he did not regard Clifton Hines as entirely sane on
+this one matter, and to his conviction that the hatred Hines then
+bore him, amounting to a delusion of persecution, might on his
+death turn against Judson Clark.  He instructed me to go to Clark,
+tell him the story, and put him on his guard.
+
+"Clark and his party had been at the ranch only a day or two when
+one night Hines turned up at Dry River.  He wanted the fifty
+thousand, or what was left of it, and when he failed to move Henry
+he attacked him.  The two men on the place heard the noise and ran
+in, but Hines got away.  Henry swore them to secrecy, and told them
+the story.  He felt he might need help.
+
+"From what the two men at the ranch told me when I got there, I
+think Hines stayed somewhere in the mountains for the next day or
+two, and that he came down for food the night Henry died.
+
+"Just what he contributed to Henry's death I do not know.  Henry
+fell in one room, and was found in bed in another when the hands
+had been taking the cattle to the winter range, and he'd been alone
+in the house.
+
+"When I got there the funeral was over.  I read the letter he had
+left, and then I talked to the two hands, Bill Ardary and Jake
+Mazetti.  They would not talk at first, but I showed them Henry's
+record and then they were free enough.  The autopsy had shown that
+Henry died from heart disease, but he had a cut on his head also,
+and they believed that Hines had come back, had quarreled with him
+again, and had knocked him down.
+
+"As Henry had in a way handed over to me his responsibility for the
+boy, and as I wanted to transfer the money, I waited for three
+weeks at the ranch, hoping he would turn up again.  I saw the
+Thorwald woman, but she protested that she did not know where he
+was.  And I made two attempts to see and warn Jud Clark, but failed
+both times.  Then one night the Thorwald woman came in, looking
+like a ghost, and admitted that Hines had been hiding in the
+mountains since Henry's death, that he insisted he had killed him,
+and that he blamed Jud Clark for that, and for all the rest of his
+troubles.  She was afraid he would kill Clark.  The three of us,
+the two men at the ranch and myself, prepared to go into the
+mountains and hunt for him, before he got snowed in.
+
+"Then came the shooting at the Clark place, and I rode over that
+night in a howling storm and helped the coroner and a Norada doctor
+in the examination.  All the evidence was against Clark, especially
+his running away.  But I happened on Hattie Thorwald outside on a
+verandah--she'd been working at the house--and I didn't need any
+conversation to tell me what she thought.  All she said was:
+
+"He didn't do it, doctor.  He's still in the mountains."
+
+"He's been here to-night, Hattie, and you know it.  He shot the
+wrong man."
+
+"But she swore he hadn't been, and at the end I didn't know.  I'll
+say right now that I don't know.  But I'll say, too, that I believe
+that is what happened, and that Hines probably stayed hidden that
+night on Hattie Thorwald's place.  I went there the next day, but
+she denied it all, and said he was still in the mountains.  She
+carried on about the blizzard and his being frozen to death, until
+I began to think she was telling the truth.
+
+"The next day I did what only a tenderfoot would do, started into
+the mountains alone.  Bill and Jake were out with a posse after
+Clark, and I packed up some food and started.  I'll not go into the
+details of that trip.  I went in from the Dry River Canyon, and I
+guess I faced death a dozen times the first day.  I had a map, but
+I lost myself in six hours.  I had food and blankets and an axe
+along, and I built a shelter and stayed there overnight.  I had to
+cut up one of my blankets the next morning and tie up the horse's
+feet, so he wouldn't sink too deep in the snow.  But it stayed
+cold and the snow hardened, and we got along better after that.
+
+"I'd have turned back more than once, but I thought I'd meet up
+with some of the sheriff's party.  I didn't do that, but I stumbled
+on a trail on the third day, toward evening.  It was the trail made
+by John Donaldson, as I learned later.  I followed it, but I
+concluded after a while that whoever made it was lost, too.  It
+seemed to be going in a circle.  I was in bad shape and had frozen
+a part of my right hand, when I saw a cabin, and there was smoke
+coming out of the chimney."
+
+From that time on David's statement dealt with the situation in the
+cabin; with Jud Clark and the Donaldsons, and with the snow storm,
+which began again and lasted for days.  He spoke at length of his
+discovery of Clark's identity, and of the fact that the boy had
+lost all memory of what had happened, and even of who he was.  He
+went into that in detail; the peculiar effect of fear and mental
+shock on a high-strung nature, especially where the physical
+condition was lowered by excess and wrong-living; his early attempts,
+as the boy improved, to pierce the veil, and then his slow-growing
+conviction that it were an act of mercy not to do so.  The
+Donaldsons' faithfulness, the cessation of the search under the
+conviction that Clark was dead, both were there, and also David's
+growing liking for Judson himself.  But David's own psychology was
+interesting and clearly put.
+
+"First of all," he dictated, in his careful old voice, "it must be
+remembered that I was not certain that the boy had committed the
+crime.  I believed, and I still believe, that Lucas was shot by
+Clifton Hines, probably through an open window.  There were no
+powder marks on the body.  I believed, too, and still believe, that
+Hines had fled after the crime, either to Hattie Thorwald's house
+or to the mountains.  In one case he had escaped and could not be
+brought to justice, and in the other he was dead, and beyond
+conviction.
+
+"But there is another element which I urge, not in defense but in
+explanation.  The boy Judson Clark was a new slate to write on.
+He had never had a chance.  He had had too much money, too much
+liberty, too little responsibility.  His errors had been wiped
+away by the loss of his memory, and he had, I felt, a chance for a
+new and useful life.
+
+"I did not come to my decision quickly.  It was a long fight for
+his life, for he had contracted pneumonia, and he had the drinker's
+heart.  But in the long days of his convalescence while Maggie
+worked in the lean-to, I had time to see what might be done.  If
+in making an experiment with a man's soul I usurped the authority
+of my Lord and Master, I am sorry.  But he knows that I did it for
+the best.
+
+"I deliberately built up for Judson Clark a new identity.  He was
+my nephew, my brother Henry's son.  He had the traditions of an
+honorable family to carry on, and those traditions were honor,
+integrity, clean living and work.  I did not stress love, for that I
+felt must be experienced, not talked about.  But love was to be the
+foundation on which I built.  The boy had had no love in his life.
+
+"It has worked out.  I may not live to see it at its fullest, but
+I defy the world to produce today a finer or more honorable
+gentleman, a more useful member of the community.  And it will last.
+The time may come when Judson Clark will again be Judson Clark.  I
+have expected it for many years.  But he will never again be the
+Judson Clark of ten years ago.  He may even will to return to the
+old reckless ways, but as I lie here, perhaps never to see him, I
+say this: he cannot go back.  His character and habits of thought
+are established.
+
+"To convict Judson Clark of the murder of Howard Lucas is to convict
+a probably or at least possibly innocent man.  To convict Richard
+Livingstone of that crime is to convict a different man, innocent
+of the crime, innocent of its memory, innocent of any single impulse
+to lift his hand against a law of God or the state."
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures.  It knew
+nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything.  Doctor David was ill
+at the seashore, and Dick was not with him.  Harrison Miller, who
+was never known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than
+the railway station in one direction and the Sayre house in the
+other, had made a trip East and was now in the far West.  Doctor
+Reynolds, who might or might not know something, had joined the
+country club and sent for his golf bag.
+
+And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and
+a determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.
+
+The village was hurt and suspicious.  It resented its lack of
+knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into
+confidence, it would have been solicitous.  It believed that
+Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the
+Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick.  And
+against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame of
+mainly feminine anger.
+
+But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a
+mystery.
+
+Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held
+high, and angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.
+
+"You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed."
+
+"I can't act, Nina.  I do go about."
+
+And Nina had a softened moment.
+
+"Don't think about him," she said.  "He isn't sick, or he would
+have had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have
+found his papers and let us know."
+
+"Then he's in some sort of trouble.  I want to go out there.  I
+want to go out there!"
+
+That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks.
+She would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away,
+but she had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she
+appealed, had refused her when he knew her purpose.
+
+"We're following him up, little sister," he said.  "Harrison Miller
+has gone out, and there's enough talk as it is."
+
+She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too
+afraid of what people might say.  It seemed so unimportant to her.
+And she could not understand the conspiracy of silence.  Other men
+went away and were not heard from, and the police were notified and
+the papers told.  It seemed to her, too, that every one, her father
+and Nina and Leslie and even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.
+
+There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when
+Harrison Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went
+west.  Leslie had been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they
+had shut her out.  And her father had not been the same since.
+
+He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger.
+Not at her, however.  He was very gentle with her.
+
+And here was a curious thing.  She had always felt that she knew
+when Dick was thinking of her.  All at once, and without any warning,
+there would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of
+surrounding and encircling sense of protection.  Rather like what
+she had felt as a little girl when she had run home through the
+terrors of twilight, and closed the house door behind her.  She was
+in the warm and lighted house, safe and cared for.
+
+That was completely gone.  It was as though the warm and lighted
+house of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she
+was alone outside, cold and frightened.
+
+She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her
+alone.  The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances
+and picnics, but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous.  She
+could not, however, avoid Mrs. Sayre.  She tried to, at first, but
+that lady's insistence and her own apathy made it easier to accept
+than to refuse.  Then, after a time, she found the house rather a
+refuge.  She seldom saw Wallie, and she found her hostess tactful,
+kindly and uninquisitive.
+
+"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some
+roses," she would say.  Or they would loot the green houses and,
+going in the car to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of
+beauty and remembrance.
+
+Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to
+the day she had told him of her engagement.  Mother and son, she
+began to feel that only with them could she be herself. For the
+village, her chin high as Nina had said.  At home, assumed
+cheerfulness.  Only at the house on the hill could she drop her pose.
+
+She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison
+Miller.  What she wanted that word to be she did not know.  There
+were, of course, times when she had to face the possibility that
+Dick had deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there
+had never been any real reason why he should care for her.  She was
+not clever and not beautiful.  Perhaps he had been disappointed in
+her, and this was the thing they were concealing.  Perhaps he had
+gone back to Wyoming and had there found some one more worthy of
+im, some one who understood when he talked about the things he did
+in his laboratory, and did not just sit and listen with loving,
+rather bewildered eyes.
+
+Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew
+it was the expected word.  She felt her mother's eyes on her, and
+she sat very still with her hands clenched in her lap.  But her
+father did not read it at the table; he got up and went out, and
+some time later he came to the door.  The telegram was not in sight.
+
+"That was from Harrison Miller," he said.  "He has traced Dick to
+a hotel at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in
+touch with him yet."
+
+He went away then, and they heard the house door close.
+
+Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming
+home, and that David was being brought back.  She saw that telegram
+from Mr. Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and
+something more ominous than either.
+
+"Reach home Tuesday night.  Nothing definite.  Think safe."
+
+"Think safe?" she asked, breathlessly.  "Then he has been in danger?
+What are you keeping from me?"  And when no one spoke: "Oh, don't
+you see how cruel it is?  You are all trying to protect me, and you
+are killing me instead."
+
+"Not danger," her father said, slowly. "So far as we know, he is
+well.  Is all right."  And seeing her face:  "It is nothing that
+affects his feeling for you, dear.  He is thinking of you and loving
+you, wherever he is.  Only, we don't know where he is."
+
+But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he
+was discouraged and sick at heart.  He went directly upstairs to
+his wife, and shut the bedroom door.
+
+"Not a trace," he said, in reply to the question in her eyes.  "The
+situation is as he outlined it in the letter.  He elaborated, of
+course.  The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that
+statement of his doesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is
+a Clifton Hines.  And even then it's all supposition.  There's a
+strong sentiment out there that Dick either killed himself or met
+with an accident and died in the mountains.  The horse wandered
+into town last week.  I'll have to tell her."
+
+Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged
+pair, helpless as is the way of middle-age before the  attacks of
+life on their young.
+
+"It will kill her, Walter."
+
+"She's young," he said sturdily.  "She'll get over it."
+
+But he did not think so, and she knew it.
+
+"There is a rather queer element in it," he observed, after a time.
+"Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night.  His stuff
+is at the hotel, but no papers to identify him.  He had looked after
+Dick that day when he was sick, and he simply vanished.  He didn't
+take the train.  He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and
+the station was being watched."  But she was not interested in
+Bassett.  The name meant nothing to her.  She harked back to the
+question that had been in both their minds since they had read, in
+stupefied amazement, David's statement.
+
+"In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he..."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"My little girl, and--Judson Clark!"
+
+But he fought that sturdily.  They had ten years of knowledge and
+respect to build on.  The past was past.  All he prayed for was
+Dick's return, an end to this long waiting.  There would be no
+reservations in his welcome, if only--
+
+Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting
+in the library.  He went like a man to his execution, and his
+resolution nearly gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair
+and pathetically patient.  He told her the story as guardedly as
+he could.  He began with Dick's story to him, about his forgotten
+youth, and went on carefully to Dick's own feeling that he must
+clear up that past before he married.  She followed him carefully,
+bewildered a little and very tense.
+
+"But why didn't he tell me?"
+
+"He saw it as a sort of weakness.  He meant to when he came back."
+
+He fought Dick's fight for him valiantly, stressing certain points
+that were to prepare her for others to come.  He plunged, indeed,
+rather recklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only
+got out of the unconscious mind with an effort.  But behind it all
+was his overwhelming desire to save her pain.
+
+"You must remember," he said, "that Dick's life before this
+happened, and since, are two different things.  Whatever he did
+then should not count against him now."
+
+"Of course not," she said.  "Then he--had done something?"
+
+"Yes.  Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities."
+
+She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.
+
+"He was young then, remember.  Only twenty-one or so.  And there
+was a quarrel with another man.  The other man was shot."
+
+"You mean Dick shot him?"
+
+"Yes.  You understand, don't you," he added anxiously, "that he
+doesn't remember doing it?"
+
+In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime
+faith with which she made her comment, through lips that had
+gone white.
+
+"Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting," she said.
+But she inquired, he thought with difficulty, "Did he die?"
+
+He could not lie to her.  "Yes," he said.
+
+She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant
+fight again for Dick.
+
+"But they let him go," she protested.  "Men do shoot in the West,
+don't they?  There must have been a reason for it.  You know Dick
+as well as I do.  He couldn't do a wrong thing."
+
+He let that pass.  "Nothing was done about it at the time," he said.
+"And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us.  He wouldn't
+have known the man's name if he heard it.  But do you see,
+sweetheart, where this is taking us?  He went back, and they tried
+to get him, for a thing he didn't remember doing."
+
+"Father!" she said, and went very white.  "Is that where he is?
+In prison?"
+
+He tried to steady his voice.
+
+"No, dear.  He escaped into the mountains.  But you can understand
+his silence.  You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot
+come back to us, with this thing hanging over him.  What we have to
+do now is to find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference.
+That he has his place in the world waiting for him, and that we are
+waiting too."
+
+When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling
+replies, he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered
+vitally to her was that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead.
+But she said, just before they went, arm in arm, up the stairs:
+
+"It is queer in one way, father.  It isn't like him to run away."
+
+He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
+
+"Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?"
+
+"Certainly not.  Why should I?"
+
+Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at
+the lack of masculine understanding.
+
+"Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate
+that as she hates nothing else.  Murder will be nothing, to that.
+And she will have to know it some time."
+
+He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window
+and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been
+standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the
+shadow of a tree box.
+
+"It's all a puzzle to me," he said, at last.  "God alone knows how
+it will turn out.  Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett,
+whoever he is, could tell us something.  I don't know."
+
+He drew the shade and wound his watch.  "I don't know," he repeated.
+
+Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and
+looked at his watch.  Then he walked briskly toward the railway
+station.  A half hour later he walked into the offices of the
+Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.
+
+"Hello, Bassett," said that gentleman.  "We thought you were dead.
+Well, how about the sister in California?  It was the Clark story,
+wasn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Bassett, noncommittally.
+
+"And it blew up on you!  Well, there were others who were fooled,
+too.  You had a holiday, anyhow."
+
+"Yes, I had a holiday," said Bassett, and going over to his own
+desk began to sort his vast accumulation of mail.  Sometime later
+he found the night editor at his elbow.
+
+"Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?" he asked.
+"Williams thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow.  You've
+been on the ground, and there's a human interest element in it.  The
+last man who talked to Clark; the ranch to-day.  That sort of thing."
+
+Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.
+
+"You take it from me," he said, "the story's dead, and so is Clark.
+The Donaldson woman was crazy.  That's all."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David,
+but with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the
+station for the group of friends who met him.
+
+David had decided on a course and meant to follow it.  That course
+was to protect Dick's name, and to keep the place he had made in
+the world open for him.  Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the
+terror that was with him day and night, that Dick had reached the
+breaking point and had gone back.  But he knew it was possible.
+Lauler had warned him against shocks and trouble, and looking back
+David could see the gradually accumulating pressure against that
+mental wall of Dick's subconscious building; overwork and David's
+illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy, and coming on
+top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the knowledge that
+he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law.  The work of ten
+years perhaps undone.
+
+Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful.  Harrison Miller
+rode up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor
+Reynolds David walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs.
+At the door of Dick's room he stopped and looked in, and then went
+on, his face set and rigid.  He would not go to bed, but sat in his
+chair while about him went on the bustle of the return, the bringing
+up of trunks and bags; but the careful smile was gone, and his
+throat, now so much too thin for his collar, worked convulsively.
+
+He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the
+station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.
+
+"He had been in a stupor all day," Miller related, "and was being
+cared for by a man named Bassett.  I daresay that's the man Gregory
+had referred to.  He may have become suspicious of Bassett.  I don't
+know.  But a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape,
+and raised an alarm.  He got a horse out of the courtyard of the
+hotel, and not a sign of him has been found since."
+
+"It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?"
+
+"No, apparently not.  The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared,
+too, the same night.  I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't
+shown up."
+
+And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.
+
+Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David
+called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.
+
+"It is my hope," he said, "to carry on exactly as though Dick might
+walk in to-morrow and take his place again.  As I hold to my belief
+in God, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that
+before I--before long.  But our friends will be asking where he is
+and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand.
+What we'd better say is simply that Dick was called away on business
+connected with some property in the West.  They may not believe it,
+but they'll hardly disprove it."
+
+So the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick Livingstone's name was
+arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party
+to it turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty and
+courage.  Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy
+gave the same explanation while she arranged David's tray.
+
+"He has been detained in the West on business," Lucy said.
+
+"He might have sent me a postcard.  And he hasn't written Doctor
+Reynolds at all."
+
+"He has been very busy.  Get the sugar bowl, Minnie. He'll be back
+soon, I'm sure."
+
+But Minnie did not immediately move.
+
+"He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David," she said,
+with twitching lips.  "And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby.  The
+talk that's going on in this town is something awful."
+
+"I don't want to hear it," Lucy said firmly.
+
+She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast
+before they started away.  But before she sat down she did a touching
+thing.  She rang the bell and called Minnie.
+
+"After this, Minnie," she said, "we will always set Doctor Richard's
+place.  Then, when he comes--"
+
+Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it,
+went back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel.  Her world
+was gone to pieces.  By years of service to the one family she had
+no other world, no home, no ties.  She was with the Livingstones, but
+not one of them.  Alone in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off.
+She thought that David, had he not been ill, would have told her.
+
+Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when
+she went up she found him sitting in Dick's room, on a stiff chair
+inside the door.  She stood beside him and put her hand on his
+shoulder, but he did not say anything, and she went away.
+
+That night David had a caller.  All evening the bell had been
+ringing, and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with
+visiting cards.  There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and
+some squab from Mrs. Sayre.  Lucy had seen no one, excusing
+herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who came at nine
+o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.
+
+"You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow," he said.
+"I'll wait."
+
+He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to
+do so, and passed it to Minnie.  She calmly read it, and rather
+defiantly carried it off.  But she came down quickly, touched by
+some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.
+
+"Hang your hat on the rack and go on up."
+
+So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in
+David's old fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser
+with the marble top, and Dick's picture in his uniform on the mantle.
+
+Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed.  He
+was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling
+story to an obviously sick man, but David's first words reassured him.
+
+"Come in," he said.  "You are the Bassett who was with Doctor
+Livingstone at Norada?"
+
+"Yes.  I see you know about it."
+
+"We know something, not everything."  Suddenly David's pose deserted
+him.  He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his
+visitor.  "Is he living?" he asked, in a low voice.
+
+"I think so.  I'm not certain."
+
+"Then you don't know where he is?"
+
+"No.  He got away--but you know that.  Sit down, doctor.  I've got
+a long story to tell."
+
+"I'll get you to call my sister first," David said.  "And tell her
+to get Harrison Miller.  Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very
+kindly went west when my health did not permit me to go."
+
+While they waited David asked only one question.
+
+"The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel,
+and the doctor who saw him--you got him, I think--said he appeared
+to have been drinking heavily.  Is that true?  He was not a
+drinking man."
+
+"I am quite sure he had not."
+
+There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it.
+He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting
+for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the
+trembling of his hands Bassett would have thought him calm and even
+placid.
+
+During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move.
+He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.
+
+"That's about all," Bassett finished.  "He had been perfectly clear
+in his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pass.  But,
+as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas
+trouble.  I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have
+used the young lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes
+pretty deep, but I didn't know it.  He was convinced after a while,
+but he was dazed, of course.  He knew it, that is, but he couldn't
+comprehend it.
+
+"I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must
+have slept like the dead.  I wakened once, early in the night, and
+he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it.  I've forgotten
+to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give
+himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him
+what a blow it would be to you and to the girl.  I wakened once
+and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old man.'  He did not
+answer at once, and then he said, 'All right.'  I was dozing off
+when he spoke again.  He said, 'Where is Beverly Carlysle now?
+Has she married again?'  'She's revived "The Valley," and she's
+in New York with it,' I told him.
+
+"When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he'd left a piece
+of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching
+the railroad, and--well, here it is."
+
+Bassett took from his pocket-book a note, and passed it over to
+David, who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it.
+It was on Dick's prescription paper, with his name at the top and
+the familiar Rx below it.  David read it aloud, his voice husky.
+
+"Many thanks for everything, Bassett," he read.  "I don't like to
+leave you, but you'll get out all right if you follow the map on
+the back of this.  I've had all night to think things out, and I'm
+leaving you because you are safer without me.  I realize now what
+you've known all day and kept from me.  That woman at the hotel
+recognized me, and they are after me.
+
+"I can't make up my mind what to do.  Ultimately I think I'll go
+back and give myself up.  I am a dead man, anyhow, to all who might
+have cared, but I've got to do one or two things first, and I want
+to think things over.  One thing you've got a right to know.  I
+hated Lucas, but it never entered my head to kill him.  How it
+happened God only knows.  I don't."
+
+It was signed "J. C."
+
+Bassett broke the silence that followed the reading.
+
+"I made every effort to find him.  I had to work alone, you
+understand, and from the west side of the range, not to arouse
+suspicion.  They were after me, too, you know.  His horse, I heard,
+worked its way back a few days ago.  It's a forsaken country, and
+if he lost his horse he was in it on foot and without food.  Of
+course there's a chance--"
+
+His voice trailed off.  In the stillness David sat, touching with
+tender tremulous fingers what might be Dick's last message, and
+gazing at the picture of Dick in his uniform.  He knew what they
+all thought, that Dick was dead and that he held his final words
+in his hands, but his militant old spirit refused to accept that
+silent verdict.  Dick might be dead to them, but he was living.
+He looked around the room defiantly, resentfully.  Of all of them
+he was the only one to have faith, and he was bound to a chair.
+He knew them.  They would sit down supinely and grieve, while time
+passed and Dick fought his battle alone.
+
+No, by God, he would not be bound to a chair.  He raised himself
+and stood, swaying on his shaking legs.
+
+"You've given up," he said scornfully.  "You make a few days'
+search, and then you quit.  It's easy to say he's dead, and so you
+say he's dead.  I'm going out there myself, and I'll make a search--"
+
+He collapsed into the chair again, and looked at them with shamed,
+appealing eyes.  Bassett was the first to break the silence, speaking
+in a carefully emotionless tone.
+
+"I haven't given up for a minute.  I've given up the search, because
+he's beyond finding just now.  Either he's got away, or he is--well,
+beyond help.  We have to go on the hypothesis that he got away, and
+in that case sooner or later you'll hear from him.  He's bound to
+remember you in time.  The worst thing is this charge against him."
+
+"He never killed Howard Lucas," David said, in a tone of conviction.
+"Harrison, read Mr. Bassett my statement to you."
+
+Bassett took the statement home with him that night, and studied it
+carefully.  It explained a great deal that had puzzled him before;
+Mrs. Wasson's story and David's arrival at the mountain cabin.  But
+most of all it explained why the Thorwald woman had sent him after
+Dick.  She knew then, in spite of her protests to David, that Jud
+Clark had not killed Lucas.
+
+He paced the floor for an hour or two, sunk in thought, and then
+unlocked a desk drawer and took out his bankbook.  He had saved a
+little money.  Not much, but it would carry him over if he couldn't
+get another leave of absence.  He thought, as he put the book away
+and prepared for bed, that it was a small price to pay for finding
+Clifton Hines and saving his own soul.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+Dick had written his note, and placed it where Bassett would be
+certain to see it.  Then he found his horse and led him for the
+first half mile or so of level ground before the trail began to
+descend.  He mounted there, for he knew the animal could find its
+way in the darkness where he could not.
+
+He felt no weariness and no hunger, although he had neither slept
+nor eaten for thirty-odd hours, and as contrasted with the night
+before his head was clear.  He was able to start a train of thought
+and to follow it through consecutively for the first time in hours.
+Thought, however, was easier than realization, and to add to his
+perplexity, he struggled to place Bassett and failed entirely.  He
+remained a mysterious and incomprehensible figure, beginning and
+ending with the trail.
+
+Then he had an odd thought, that brought him up standing.  He had
+only Bassett's word for the story.  Perhaps Bassett was lying to
+him, or mad.  He rode on after a moment, considering that, but
+there was something, not in Bassett's circumstantial narrative but
+in himself, that refused to accept that loophole of escape.  He
+could not have told what it was.
+
+And, with his increasing clarity, he began to make out the case for
+Bassett and against himself; the unfamiliar clothing he wore, the
+pad with the name of Livingstone on it and the sign Rx, the other
+contents of his pockets.
+
+He tried to orient himself in Bassett's story.  A doctor.  The
+devil's irony of it!  Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing
+babies.  Peddling pills.  Leading what Bassett had called a life
+of usefulness!  That was a career for you, a pill peddler.  God!
+
+But underlying all his surface thinking was still the need of
+flight, and he was continually confusing it with the earlier one.
+One moment he was looking about for the snow of that earlier escape,
+and the next he would remember, and the sense of panic would leave
+him.  After all he meant to surrender eventually.  It did not matter
+if they caught him.
+
+But, like the sense of flight, there was something else in his mind,
+something that he fought down and would not face.  When it came up
+he thrust it back fiercely.  That something was the figure of Beverly
+Carlysle, stooping over her husband's body.  He would have died to
+save her pain, and yet last night--no, it wasn't last night.  It was
+years and years ago, and all this time she had hated him.
+
+It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.
+
+He was very thirsty, and water did not satisfy him.  He wanted a
+real drink.  He wanted alcohol.  Suddenly he wanted all the liquor
+in the world.  The craving came on at dawn, and after that he kicked
+his weary horse on recklessly, so that it rocked and stumbled down
+the trail.  He had only one thought after the frenzy seized him,
+and that was to get to civilization and whisky.  It was as though
+he saw in drunkenness his only escape from the unbearable.  In all
+probability he would have killed both his horse and himself in the
+grip of that sudden madness, but deliverance came in the shape of a
+casual rider, a stranger who for a moment took up the shuttle, wove
+his bit of the pattern and passed on, to use his blow-pipe, his
+spirit lamp and his chemicals in some prospector's paradise among
+the mountains.
+
+When Dick heard somewhere ahead the creaking of saddle leather and
+the rattle of harness he drew aside on the trail and waited.  He
+had lost all caution in the grip of his craving, and all fear.  A
+line of loaded burros rounded a point ahead and came toward him,
+picking their way delicately with small deliberate feet and walking
+on the outer edge of the trail, after the way of pack animals the
+world over.  Behind them was a horseman, rifle in the scabbard on
+his saddle and spurs jingling.  Dick watched him with thirsty,
+feverish eyes as he drew near.  He could hardly wait to put his
+question.
+
+"Happen to have a drink about you, partner?" he called.
+
+The man stopped his horse and grinned.
+
+"Pretty early in the morning for a drink, isn't it?" he inquired.
+Then he saw Dick's eyes, and reached reluctantly into his saddle
+bag. "I've got a quart here," he said.  "I've traveled forty miles
+and spent nine dollars to get it, but I guess you need some."
+
+"You wouldn't care to sell it, I suppose?"
+
+"The bottle?  Not on your life."
+
+He untied a tin cup from his saddle and carefully poured a fair
+amount into it, steadying the horse the while.
+
+"Here," he said, and passed it over.  "But you'd better cut it out
+after this.  It's bad medicine.  You've got two good drinks there.
+Be careful."
+
+Dick took the cup and looked at the liquor.  The odor assailed him,
+and for a queer moment he felt a sudden distaste for it.  He had a
+revulsion that almost shook him.  But he drank it down and passed
+the cup back.
+
+"You've traveled a long way for it," he said, "and I needed it, I
+guess.  If you'll let me pay for it--"
+
+"Forget it," said the man amiably, and started his horse.  "But
+better cut it out, first chance you get.  It's bad medicine."
+
+He rode on after his vanishing pack, and Dick took up the trail
+again.  But before long he began to feel sick and dizzy.  The
+aftertaste of the liquor in his mouth nauseated him.  The craving
+had been mental habit, not physical need, and his body fought the
+poison rebelliously.  After a time the sickness passed, and he
+slept in the saddle.  He roused once, enough to know that the horse
+had left the trail and was grazing in a green meadow.  Still
+overcome with his first real sleep he tumbled out of the saddle and
+stretched himself out on the ground.  He slept all day, lying out
+in the burning sun, his face upturned to the sky.
+
+When he wakened it was twilight, and the horse had disappeared.
+His face burned from the sun, and his head ached violently.  He
+was weak, too, from hunger, and the morning's dizziness persisted.
+Connected thought was impossible, beyond the fact that if he did
+not get out soon, he would be too weak to travel.  Exhausted and
+on the verge of sunstroke, he set out on foot to find the trail.
+
+He traveled all night, and the dawn found him still moving, a mere
+automaton of a man, haggard and shambling, no longer willing his
+progress, but somehow incredibly advancing.  He found water and
+drank it, fell, got up, and still, right foot, left foot, he went
+on.  Some time during that advance he had found a trail, and he
+kept to it automatically.  He felt no surprise and no relief when
+he saw a cabin in a clearing and a woman in the doorway, watching
+him with curious eyes.  He pulled himself together and made a final
+effort, but without much interest in the result.
+
+"I wonder if you could give me some food?" he said.  "I have lost
+my horse and I've been wandering all night."
+
+"I guess I can," she replied, not unamiably.  "You look as though
+you need it, and a wash, too.  There's a basin and a pail of water
+on that bench."
+
+But when she came out later to call him to breakfast she found
+him sitting on the bench and the pail overturned on the ground.
+
+"I'm sorry," he said, dully, "I tried to lift it, but I'm about
+all in."
+
+"You'd better come in.  I've made some coffee."
+
+He could not rise.  He could not even raise his hands.
+
+She called her husband from where he was chopping wood off in the
+trees, and together they got him into the house.  It was days
+before he so much as spoke again.
+
+So it happened that the search went on.  Wilkins from the east of
+the range, and Bassett from the west, hunted at first with furious
+energy, then spasmodically, then not at all, while Dick lay in a
+mountain cabin, on the bed made of young trees, and for the second
+time in his life watched a woman moving in a lean-to kitchen, and
+was fed by a woman's hand.
+
+He forced himself to think of this small panorama of life that
+moved before him, rather than of himself.  The woman was young, and
+pretty in a slovenly way.  The man was much older, and silent.  He
+was of better class than the woman, and underlying his assumption
+of crudity there were occasional outcroppings of some cultural
+background.  Not then, nor at any subsequent time, did he learn the
+story, if story there was.  He began to see them, however, not so
+much pioneers as refugees.  The cabin was, he thought, a haven to
+the man and a prison to the woman.
+
+But they were uniformly kind to him, and for weeks he stayed there,
+slowly readjusting.  In his early convalescence he would sit paring
+potatoes or watching a cooking pot for her.  As he gained in
+strength he cut a little firewood.  Always he sought something to
+keep him from thinking.
+
+Two incidents always stood out afterwards in his memory of the
+cabin.  One was the first time he saw himself in a mirror.  He
+knew by that time that Bassett's story had been true, and that he
+was ten years older than he remembered himself to be.  He thought
+he was in a measure prepared.  But he saw in the glass a man whose
+face was lined and whose hair was streaked with gray.  The fact
+that his beard had grown added to the terrible maturity of the
+reflection he saw, and he sent the mirror clattering to the ground.
+
+The other incident was later, and when he was fairly strong again.
+The man was caught under a tree he was felling, and badly hurt.
+During the hour or so that followed, getting the tree cut away,
+and moving the injured man to the cabin on a wood sledge, Dick
+had the feeling of helplessness of any layman in an accident.  He
+was solicitous but clumsy.  But when they had got the patient into
+his bed, quite automatically he found himself making an
+investigation and pronouncing a verdict.
+
+Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submerged
+memory, rising above the flood.  At the time all he felt was a great
+certainty.  He must act quickly or the man would not live.  And
+that night, with such instruments as he could extemporize, he
+operated.  There was no time to send to a town.
+
+All night, after the operation, Dick watched by the bedside, the
+woman moving back and forth restlessly.  He got his only knowledge
+of the story, such as it was, then when she said once:
+
+"I deserved this, but he didn't.  I took him away from his wife."
+
+He had to stay on after that, for the woman could not be left
+alone.  And he was glad of the respite, willing to drift until he
+got his bearings.  Certain things had come back, more as pictures
+than realities.  Thus he saw David clearly, Lucy dimly, Elizabeth
+not at all.  But David came first; David in the buggy with the
+sagging springs, David's loud voice and portly figure, David, steady
+and upright and gentle as a woman.  But there was something wrong
+about David.  He puzzled over that, but he was learning not to try
+to force things, to let them come to the surface themselves.
+
+It was two or three days later that he remembered that David was
+ill, and was filled with a sickening remorse and anxiety.  For the
+first time he made plans to get away, for whatever happened after
+that he knew he must see David again.  But all his thought led him
+to an impasse at that time, and that impasse was the feeling that
+he was a criminal and a fugitive, and that he had no right to tie
+up innocent lives with his.  Even a letter to David might
+incriminate him.
+
+Coupled with his determination to surrender, the idea of atonement
+was strong in him.  An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.
+That had been his father's belief, and well he remembered it.  But
+during the drifting period he thrust it back, into that painful
+niche where he held Beverly, and the thing he would not face.
+
+That phase of his readjustment, then, when he reached it, was
+painful and confused.  There was the necessity for atonement,
+which involved surrender, and there was the call of David, and the
+insistent desire to see Beverly again, which was the thing he
+would not face.  Of the three, the last, mixed up as it was with
+the murder and its expiation, was the strongest.  For by the very
+freshness of his released memories, it was the days before his
+flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, and his life with
+David that was long ago, and blurred in its details as by the
+passing of infinite time.
+
+When Elizabeth finally came back to him it was as something very
+gentle and remote, out of the long-forgotten past.  Even his image
+of her was blurred and shadowy.  He could not hear the tones of her
+voice, or remember anything she had said.  He could never bring her
+at will, as he could David, for instance.  She only came clearly
+at night, while he slept.  Then the guard was down, and there crept
+into his dreams a small figure, infinitely loving and tender; but
+as he roused from sleep she changed gradually into Beverly.  It
+was Beverly's arms he felt around his neck.  Nevertheless he held
+to Elizabeth more completely than he knew, for the one thing that
+emerged from his misty recollection of her was that she cared for
+him.  In a world of hate and bitterness she cared.
+
+But she was never real to him, as the other woman was real.  And
+he knew that she was lost to him, as David was lost.  He could
+never go back to either of them.
+
+As time went on he reached the point of making practical plans.
+He had lost his pocketbook somewhere, probably during his
+wanderings afoot, and he had no money.  He knew that the obvious
+course was to go to the nearest settlement and surrender himself
+and he played with the thought, but even as he did so he knew that
+he would not do it.  Surrender he would, eventually, but before he
+did that he would satisfy a craving that was in some ways like his
+desire for liquor that morning on the trail.  A reckless, mad, and
+irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucas again.
+
+In August he started for the railroad, going on foot and without
+money, his immediate destination the harvest fields of some distant
+ranch, his object to earn his train fare to New York.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+The summer passed slowly.  To David and Elizabeth it was a long
+waiting, but with this difference, that David was kept alive by
+hope, and that Elizabeth felt sometimes that hope was killing her.
+To David each day was a new day, and might hold Dick.  To Elizabeth,
+after a time, each day was but one more of separation.
+
+Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house, but he was
+not like Dick.  He was a heavy, silent young man, shy of intruding
+into the family life and already engrossed in a budding affair with
+the Rossiter girl.  David tolerated him, but with a sort of
+smouldering jealousy increased by the fact that he had introduced
+innovations David resented; had for instance moved Dick's desk
+nearer the window, and instead of doing his own laboratory work
+had what David considered a damnably lazy fashion of sending his
+little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to a hospital in town.
+
+David found the days very long and infinitely sad.  He wakened
+each morning to renewed hope, watched for the postman from his
+upper window, and for Lucy's step on the stairs with the mail.
+His first glimpse of her always told him the story.  At the
+beginning he had insisted on talking about Dick, but he saw that
+it hurt her, and of late they had fallen into the habit of long
+silences.
+
+The determination to live on until that return which he never ceased
+to expect only carried him so far, however.  He felt no incentive to
+activity.  There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she felt
+that if he would only move about, go downstairs and attend to his
+office practice, get out into the sun and air, he would grow
+stronger.  But there were times, too, when she felt that only the
+will to live was carrying him on.
+
+Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew.  The search had
+been abandoned.  Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that
+the house was under surveillance, against Dick's possible return.
+Often she lay in her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was
+dead.  She had never understood the talk that at first had gone on
+about her, when Bassett and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the
+psycho-analyst David had consulted in town, had got together in
+David's bedroom.  The mind was the mind, and Dick was Dick.  This
+thing about habit, over which David pored at night when he should
+have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen to, with an air of
+triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.
+
+A man properly trained in right habits of thinking and of action
+could not think wrong and go wrong, David argued.  He even went
+further.  He said that love was a habit, and that love would bring
+Dick back to him.  That he could not forget them.
+
+She believed that, of course, if he still lived.  But hadn't Mr.
+Bassett, who seemed so curiously mixed in the affair, been out
+again to Norada without result?  No, it was all over, and she felt
+that it would be a comfort to know where he lay, and to bring him
+back to some well-loved and tended grave.
+
+Elizabeth came often to see them.  She looked much the same as ever,
+although she was very slender and her smile rather strained, and
+she and David would have long talks together.  She always felt
+rather like an empty vessel when she went in, but David filled her
+with hope and sent her away cheered and visibly brighter to her
+long waiting.  She rather avoided Lucy, for Lucy's fears lay in her
+face and were like a shadow over her spirit.  She came across her
+one day putting Dick's clothing away in camphor, and the act took
+on an air of finality that almost crushed her.
+
+So far they had kept from her Dick's real identity, but certain
+things they had told her.  She knew that he had gone back, in some
+strange way, to the years before he came to Haverly, and that he
+had temporarily forgotten everything since.  But they had told her
+too, and seemed to believe themselves, that it was only temporary.
+
+At first the thought had been more than she could bear.  But she
+had to live her life, and in such a way as to hide her fears.
+Perhaps it was good for her, the necessity of putting up a bold
+front, to join the conspiracy that was to hold Dick's place in the
+world against the hope of his return.  And she still went to the
+Sayre house, sure that there at least there would be no curious
+glances, no too casual questions.  She could not be sure of that
+even at home, for Nina was constantly conjecturing.
+
+"I sometimes wonder-" Nina began one day, and stopped.
+
+"Wonder what?"
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose I might as well go on.  Do you ever think that
+if Dick had gone back, as they say he has, that there might be
+somebody else?"
+
+"Another girl, you mean?"
+
+"Yes.  Some one he knew before."
+
+Nina was watching her.  Sometimes she almost burst with the drama
+she was suppressing.  She had been a small girl when Judson Clark
+had disappeared, but even at twelve she had known something of the
+story.  She wanted frantically to go about the village and say to
+them: "Do you know who has been living here, whom you used to
+patronize?  Judson Clark, one of the richest men in the world!"
+She built day dreams on that foundation.  He would come back, for
+of course he would be found and acquitted, and buy the Sayre place
+perhaps, or build a much larger one, and they would all go to
+Europe in his yacht.  But she knew now that the woman Leslie had
+sent his flowers to had loomed large in Dick's past,  and she both
+hated and feared her.  Not content with having given her, Nina,
+some bad hours, she saw the woman now possibly blocking her
+ambitions for Elizabeth.
+
+"What I'm getting at is this," she said, examining her polished
+nails critically.  "If it does turn out that there was somebody,
+you'd have to remember that it was all years and years ago, and
+be sensible."
+
+"I only want him back," Elizabeth said.  "I don't care how he comes,
+so he comes."
+
+Louis Bassett had become a familiar figure in the village life by
+that time.  David depended on him with a sort of wistful confidence
+that set him to grinding his teeth occasionally in a fury at his
+own helplessness.  And, as the extent of the disaster developed,
+as he saw David failing and Lucy ageing, and when in time he met
+Elizabeth, the feeling of his own guilt was intensified.
+
+He spent hours studying the case, and he was chiefly instrumental
+in sending Harrison Miller back to Norada in September.  He had
+struck up a friendship with Miller over their common cause, and
+the night he was to depart that small inner group which was fighting
+David's battle for him formed a board of strategy in Harrison's
+tidy living-room; Walter Wheeler and Bassett, Miller and, tardily
+taken into their confidence, Doctor Reynolds.
+
+The same group met him on his return, sat around with expectant
+faces while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on
+the table, and waited while their envoy, laying Bassett's map on
+the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the
+trail beyond the pass, some sketchy mountains, and a small square.
+
+"I've got something," he said at last.  "Not much, but enough to
+work on.  Here's where you lost him, Bassett."  He pointed with his
+pencil.  "He went on for a while on the horse.  Then somehow he must
+have lost the horse, for he turned up on foot, date unknown, in a
+state of exhaustion at a cabin that lies here.  I got lost myself,
+or I'd never have found the place.  He was sick there for weeks, and
+he seems to have stayed on quite a while after he recovered, as
+though he couldn't decide what to do next."
+
+Walter Wheeler stirred and looked up.
+
+"What sort of condition was he in when he left?"
+
+"Very good, they said."
+
+"You're sure it was Livingstone?"
+
+"The man there had a tree fall on him.  He operated.  I guess that's
+the answer."
+
+He considered the situation.
+
+"It's the answer to more than that," Reynolds said slowly.  "It
+shows he had come back to himself.  If he hadn't he couldn't have
+done it."
+
+"And after that?" some one asked.
+
+"I lost him.  He left to hike to the railroad, and he said nothing
+of his plans.  If I'd been able to make open inquiries I might
+have turned up something, but I couldn't.  It's a hard proposition.
+I had trouble finding Hattie Thorwald, too.  She'd left the hotel,
+and is living with her son.  She swears she doesn't know where
+Clifton Hines is, and hasn't seen him for years."
+
+Bassett had been listening intently, his head dropped forward.
+
+"I suppose the son doesn't know about Hines?"
+
+"No.  She warned me.  He was surly and suspicious.  The sheriff had
+sent for him and questioned him about how you got his horse, and I
+gathered that he thought I was a detective.  When I told him I was
+a friend of yours, he sent you a message.  You may be able to make
+something out of it.  I can't. He said: `You can tell him I didn't
+say anything about the other time.'"
+
+Bassett sat forward.
+
+"The other time?"
+
+"He is under the impression that his mother got the horse for you
+once before, about ten days before Clark escaped.  At night, also."
+
+"Not for me," Bassett said decisively.  "Ten days before that I
+was--" he got out his notebook and consulted it.  "I was on my way
+to the cabin in the mountains, where the Donaldsons had hidden Jud
+Clark.  I hired a horse at a livery stable."
+
+"Could the Thorwald woman have followed you?"
+
+"Why the devil should she do that?" he asked irritably.  "She didn't
+know who I was.  She hadn't a chance at my papers, for I kept them
+on me.  If she did suspect I was on the case, a dozen fellows had
+preceded me, and half of them had gone to the cabin."
+
+"Nevertheless," he finished, "I believe she did.  She or Hines
+himself.  There was some one on a horse outside the cabin that night."
+
+There was silence in the room, Harrison Miller thoughtfully drawing
+at random on the map before him.  Each man was seeing the situation
+from his own angle; to Reynolds, its medical interest, and the
+possibility of his permanency in the town; to Walter Wheeler,
+Elizabeth's spoiled young life; to Harrison Miller, David; and to
+the reporter a conviction that the clues he now held should lead
+him somewhere, and did not.
+
+Before the meeting broke up Miller took a folded manuscript from
+the table and passed it to Bassett.
+
+"Copy of the Coroner's inquiry, after the murder," he said.  "Thought
+it might interest you..."
+
+Then, for a time, that was all.  Bassett, poring at home over the
+inquest records, and finding them of engrossing interest, saw the
+futility of saving a man who could not be found.  And even Nina's
+faith, that the fabulously rich could not die obscurely, began to
+fade as the summer waned.  She restored some of her favor to Wallie
+Sayre, and even listened again to his alternating hopes and fears.
+
+And by the end of September he felt that he had gained real headway
+with Elizabeth.  He had come to a point where she needed him more
+than she realized, where the call in her of youth for youth, even
+in trouble, was insistent.  In return he felt his responsibility
+and responded to it.  In the vernacular of the town he had "settled
+down," and the general trend of opinion, which had previously
+disapproved him, was now that Elizabeth might do worse.
+
+On a crisp night early in October he had brought her home from
+Nina's, and because the moon was full they sat for a time on the
+steps of the veranda, Wallie below her, stirring the dead leaves
+on the walk with his stick, and looking up at her with boyish
+adoring eyes when she spoke.  He was never very articulate with
+her, and her trouble had given her a strange new aloofness that
+almost frightened him.  But that night, when she shivered a little,
+he reached up and touched her hand.
+
+"You're cold," he said almost roughly.  He was sometimes rather
+savage, for fear he might be tender.
+
+"I'm not cold.  I think it's the dead leaves."
+
+"Dead leaves?" he repeated, puzzled.  "You're a queer girl,
+Elizabeth.  Why dead leaves?"
+
+"I hate the fall.  It's the death of the year."
+
+"Nonsense.  It's going to bed for a long winter's nap. That's all.
+I'll bring you a wrap."
+
+He went in, and came out in a moment with her father's overcoat.
+
+"Here," he said peremptorily, "put this on.  I'm not going to be
+called on the carpet for giving you a sniffle."
+
+She stood up obediently and he put the big coat around her.  Then,
+obeying an irresistible impulse, he caught her to him.  He released
+her immediately, however, and stepped back.
+
+"I love you so," he stammered.  "I'm sorry.  I'll not do it again."
+
+She was startled, but not angry.
+
+"I don't like it," was all she said.  And because she did not want
+him to think she was angry, she sat down again.  But the boy was
+shaken.  He got out a cigarette and lighted it, his hands trembling.
+He could not think of anything to say.  It was as though by that
+one act he had cut a bridge behind him and on the other side lay
+all the platitudes, the small give and take of their hours together.
+What to her was a regrettable incident was to him a great dramatic
+climax.  Boylike, he refused to recognize its unimportance to her.
+He wanted to talk about it.
+
+"When you said just now that you didn't like what I did just then,
+do you mean you didn't like me to do it?  Or that you don't care for
+that sort of thing?  Of course I know," he added hastily, "you're
+not that kind of girl.  I--"
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+"You know I'm still in love with you, don't you, Elizabeth?"
+
+She returned his gaze frankly.
+
+"I don't see how you can be when you know what you do know."
+
+"I know how you feel now.  But I know that people don't go on
+loving hopelessly all their lives.  You're young.  You've got"
+--he figured quickly--"you've got about fifty-odd years to live
+yet, and some of these days you'll be--not forgetting," he
+changed, when he saw her quick movement.  "I know you'll not forget
+him.  But remembering and loving are different."
+
+"I wonder," she said, her eyes on the moon, and full of young
+tragedy.  "If they are, if one can remember without loving, then
+couldn't one love without remembering?"
+
+He stared at her.
+
+"You're too deep for me sometimes," he said.  "I'm not subtle,
+Elizabeth.  I daresay I'm stupid in lots of things.  But I'm not
+stupid about this.  I'm not trying to get a promise, you know.
+I only want you to know how things are.  I don't want to know why
+he went away, or why he doesn't come back.  I only want you to face
+the facts.  I'd be good to you," he finished, in a low tone.  "I'd
+spend my life thinking of ways to make you happy."
+
+She was touched.  She reached down and put her hand on his shoulder.
+
+"You deserve the best, Wallie.  And you're asking for a second best.
+Even that--I'm just not made that way, I suppose.  Fifty years or
+a hundred, it would be all the same."
+
+"You'd always care for him, you mean?"
+
+"Yes.  I'm afraid so."
+
+When he looked at her her eyes had again that faraway and yet
+flaming look which he had come to associate with her thoughts of
+Dick.  She seemed infinitely removed from him, traveling her lonely
+road past loving outstretched hands and facing ahead toward--well,
+toward fifty years of spinsterhood.  The sheer waste of it made
+him shudder.
+
+"You're cold, too, Wallie," she said gently.  "You'd better go home."
+
+He was about to repudiate the idea scornfully, when he sneezed!
+She got up at once and held out her hand.
+
+"You are very dear to feel about me the way you do" she said, rather
+rapidly.  "I appreciate your telling me.  And if you're chilly when
+you get home, you'd better take some camphor."
+
+He saw her in, hat in hand, and then turned and stalked up the
+street.  Camphor, indeed!  But so stubborn was hope in his young
+heart that before he had climbed the hill he was finding comfort
+in her thought for him.
+
+Mrs. Sayre had been away for a week, visiting in Michigan, and he
+had not expected her for a day or so.  To his surprise he found
+her on the terrace, wrapped in furs, and evidently waiting for him.
+
+"I wasn't enjoying it," she explained, when he had kissed her.
+"It's a summer place, not heated to amount to anything, and when
+it turned cold--where have you been to-night?"
+
+"Dined at the Wards', and then took Elizabeth home."
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"She's all right."
+
+"And there's no news?"
+
+He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under
+suppressed excitement.
+
+"What's the matter, mother?  You're worried about something, aren't
+you?"
+
+"I have something to tell you.  We'd better go inside."  He followed
+her in, unexcited and half smiling.  Her world was a small one, of
+minor domestic difficulties, of not unfriendly gossip, of occasional
+money problems, investments and what not.  He had seen her hands
+tremble over a matter of a poorly served dinner.  So he went into
+the house, closed the terrace window and followed her to the library.
+When she closed the door he recognized her old tactics when the
+servants were in question.
+
+"Well?" he inquired.  "I suppose--"  Then he saw her face.
+"Sorry, mother.  What's the trouble?"
+
+"Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central
+Washington, a harvest hand or "working stiff" among other migratory
+agricultural workers.  Among them, but not entirely of them.
+Recruited from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a
+slave market on the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin,
+fully but badly fed, overflowing with blasphemy and filled with
+sullen hate for those above them in the social scale, the "stiffs"
+regarded him with distrust from the start.
+
+In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of
+philosophy.  His physical condition was poor.  At night he ached
+intolerably, collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the
+dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion.  There were times when he
+felt that it would be better to return at once to Norada and
+surrender, for that he must do so eventually he never doubted.
+It was as well perhaps that he had no time for brooding, but he
+gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all day.
+
+A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he
+felt like a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection
+into life, but without life.  And more than once he tried to sink
+down to the level of the others, to unite himself again with the
+crowd, to feel again the touch of elbows, the sensation of
+fellowship.  The primal instinct of the herd asserted itself, the
+need of human companionship of any sort.
+
+But he failed miserably, as Jud Clark could never have failed.  He
+could not drink with them.  He could not sink to their level of
+degradation.  Their oaths and obscenity sickened and disgusted him,
+and their talk of women drove him into the fresh air.
+
+The fact that he could no longer drink himself into a stupor puzzled
+him.  Bad whiskey circulated freely among the hay stacks and bunk
+houses where the harvest hands were quartered, and at ruinous
+prices.  The men clubbed together to buy it, and he put in his
+share, only to find that it not only sickened him, but that he had
+a mental inhibition against it.
+
+They called him the "Dude," and put into it gradually all the class
+hatred of their wretched sullen lives.  He had to fight them, more
+than once, and had they united against him he might have been killed.
+But they never united.  Their own personal animosities and angers
+kept them apart, as their misery held them together.  And as time
+went on and his muscles hardened he was able to give a better
+account of himself.  The time came when they let him alone, and
+when one day a big shocker fell off a stack and broke his leg and
+Dick set it, he gained their respect.  They asked no questions, for
+their law was that the past was the past.  They did not like him,
+but in the queer twisted ethics of the camp they judged the secret
+behind him by the height from which he had fallen, and began slowly
+to accept him as of the brotherhood of derelicts.
+
+With his improvement in his physical condition there came, toward
+the end of the summer, a more rapid subsidence of the flood of the
+long past.  He had slept out one night in the fields, where the
+uncut alfalfa was belled with purple flowers and yellow buttercups
+rose and nodded above him.  With the first touch of dawn on the
+mountains he wakened to a clarity of mind like that of the morning.
+He felt almost an exaltation.  He stood up and threw out his arms.
+
+It was all his again, never to lose, the old house, and David and
+Lucy; the little laboratory; the church on Sunday mornings.  Mike,
+whistling in the stable.  A wave of love warmed him, a great
+surging tenderness.  He would go back to them.  They were his and
+he was theirs.  It was at first only a great emotion; a tingling
+joyousness, a vast relief, as of one who sees, from a far distance,
+the lights in the windows of home.  Save for the gap between the
+drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening to David's face
+bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear.  Still by an
+effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions of
+his life with only a scar between them.
+
+Not that he formulated it.  It was rather a mood, an impulse of
+unreasoning happiness.  The last cloud had gone, the last bit of
+mist from the valley.  He saw Haverly, and the children who played
+in its shaded streets; Mike washing the old car, and the ice cream
+freezer on Sundays, wrapped in sacking on the kitchen porch.  Jim
+Wheeler came back to him, the weight of his coffin dragging at his
+right hand as he helped to carry it; he was kneeling beside
+Elizabeth's bed, and putting his hand over her staring eyes so
+she would go to sleep.
+
+The glow died away, and he began to suffer intensely.  They were
+all lost to him, along with the life they represented.  And already
+he began to look back on his period of forgetfulness with regret.
+At least then he had not known what he had lost.
+
+He wondered again what they knew.  What did they think?  If they
+believed him dead, was that not kinder than the truth?  Outside of
+David and Lucy, and of course Bassett, the sole foundation on which
+any search for him had rested had been the semi-hysterical
+recognition of Hattie Thorwald.  But he wondered how far that
+search had gone.
+
+Had it extended far enough to involve David?  Had the hue and cry
+died away, or were the police still searching for him?  Could he
+even write to David, without involving him in his own trouble?  For
+David, fine, wonderful old David--David had deliberately obstructed
+the course of justice, and was an accessory after the fact.
+
+Up to that time he had drifted, unable to set a course in the fog,
+but now he could see the way, and it led him back to Norada.  He
+would not communicate with David.  He would go out of the lives at
+the old house as he had gone in, under a lie.  When he surrendered
+it would be as Judson Clark, with his lips shut tight on the years
+since his escape.  Let them think, if they would, that the curtain
+that had closed down over his memory had not lifted, and that he
+had picked up life again where he had laid it down.  The police
+would get nothing from him to incriminate David.
+
+But he had a moment, too, when surrender seemed to him not strength
+but weakness; where its sheer supineness, its easy solution to his
+problem revolted him, where he clenched his fist and looked at it,
+and longed for the right to fight his way out.
+
+When smoke began to issue from the cook-house chimney he stirred,
+rose and went back.  He ate no breakfast, and the men, seeing his
+squared jaw and set face, let him alone.  He worked with the strength
+of three men that day, but that night, when the foreman offered him
+a job as pacer, with double wages, he refused it.
+
+"Give it to somebody else, Joe," he said.  "I'm quitting."
+
+"The hell you are!  When?"
+
+"I'd like to check out to-night."
+
+His going was without comment.  They had never fully accepted him,
+and comings and goings without notice in the camp were common.  He
+rolled up his bedding, his change of under-garments inside it, and
+took the road that night.
+
+The railroad was ten miles away, and he made the distance easily.
+He walked between wire fences, behind which horses moved restlessly
+as he passed and cattle slept around a water hole, and as he walked
+he faced a situation which all day he had labored like three men
+to evade.
+
+He was going out of life.  It did not much matter whether it was
+to be behind bars or to pay the ultimate price.  The shadow that
+lay over him was that he was leaving forever David and all that he
+stood for, and a woman.  And the woman was not Elizabeth.
+
+He cursed himself in the dark for a fool and a madman; he cursed
+the infatuation which rose like a demoniac possession from his
+early life.  When that failed he tried to kill it by remembering
+the passage of time, the loathing she must have nursed all these
+years.  He summoned the image of Elizabeth to his aid, to find it
+eclipsed by something infinitely more real and vital.  Beverly in
+her dressing-room, grotesque and yet lovely in her make-up; Beverly
+on the mountain-trail, in her boyish riding clothes.  Beverly.
+
+Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more
+quickly than his emotions.  And by that strange faculty by which
+an idea often becomes stronger in memory than in its original
+production he found himself in the grip of a passion infinitely
+more terrible than his earlier one for her.  It wiped out the
+memory, even the thought, of Elizabeth, and left him a victim of
+its associated emotions.  Bitter jealousy racked him, remorse and
+profound grief.  The ten miles of road to the railroad became ten
+miles of torture, of increasing domination of the impulse to go to
+her, and of final surrender.
+
+In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes were ragged, and
+with the remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago.  Beyond
+Chicago he had no thought save one.  Some way, somehow, he must get
+to New York.  Yet all the time he was fighting.  He tried again and
+again to break away from the emotional associations from which his
+memory of her was erected; when that failed he struggled to face
+reality; the lapse of time, the certainty of his disappointment, at
+the best the inevitable parting when he went back to Norada.  But
+always in the end he found his face turned toward the East, and her.
+
+He had no fear of starving.  If he had learned the cost of a dollar
+in blood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle.  There was a
+time, in Chicago, when the necessity of thinking about money
+irritated him, for the memory of his old opulent days was very
+clear.  Times when his temper was uncertain, and he turned surly.
+Times when his helplessness brought to his lips the old familiar
+blasphemies of his youth, which sounded strange and revolting to
+his ears.
+
+He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having
+lost so much time, he must advance with every minute.  And
+Chicago drove him frantic.  There came a time there when he made a
+deliberate attempt to sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness
+by burying one wretchedness under another.  He attempted to find
+work and failed, and he tried to let go and sink.  The total result
+of the experiment was that he wakened one morning in his
+lodging-house ill and with his money gone, save for some small
+silver.  He thought ironically, lying on his untidy bed, that even
+the resources of the depths were closed to him.
+
+He never tried that experiment again.  He hated himself for it.
+
+For days he haunted the West Madison Street employment agencies.
+But the agencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered
+aimlessly with the objectless shuffle of the unemployed.  Beds had
+gone up in the lodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the
+food in the cheap restaurants was almost uneatable.  There came a
+day when the free morning coffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its
+soup and potatoes and carrots at night was all he ate.
+
+For the first time his courage began to fail him.  He went to the
+lakeside that night and stood looking at the water.  He meant to
+fight that impulse of cowardice at the source.
+
+Up to that time he had given no thought whatever to his estate,
+beyond the fact that he had been undoubtedly adjudged legally dead
+and his property divided.  But that day as he turned away from the
+lake front, he began to wonder about it.  After all, since he meant
+to surrender himself before long, why not telegraph collect to the
+old offices of the estate in New York and have them wire him money?
+But even granting that they were still in existence, he knew with
+what lengthy caution, following stunned surprise, they would go
+about investigating the message.  And there were leaks in the
+telegraph.  He would have a pack of newspaper hounds at his heels
+within a few hours.  The police, too.  No, it wouldn't do.
+
+The next day he got a job as a taxicab driver, and that night and
+every night thereafter he went back to West Madison Street and
+picked up one or more of the derelicts there and bought them food.
+He developed quite a system about it.  He waited until he saw a
+man stop outside an eating-house look in and then pass on.  But
+one night he got rather a shock.  For the young fellow he accosted
+looked at him first with suspicion, which was not unusual, and
+later with amazement.
+
+"Captain Livingstone!" he said, and checked his hand as it was
+about to rise to the salute.  His face broke into a smile, and he
+whipped off his cap.  "You've forgotten me, sir," he said.  "But
+I've got your visiting card on the top of my head all right.  Can
+you see it?"
+
+He bent his head and waited, but on no immediate reply being
+forthcoming, for Dick was hastily determining on a course of action,
+he looked up.  It was then that he saw Dick's cheap and shabby
+clothes, and his grin faded.
+
+"I say," he said.  "You are Livingstone, aren't you? I'd have
+known--"
+
+"I think you've made a mistake, old man," Dick said, feeling for
+his words carefully.  "That's not my name, anyhow.  I thought, when
+I saw you staring in at that window--How about it?"
+
+The boy looked at him again, and then glanced away.
+
+"I was looking, all right," he said.  "I've been having a run of
+hard luck."
+
+It had been Dick's custom to eat with his finds, and thus remove
+from the meal the quality of detached charity.  Men who would not
+take money would join him in a meal.  But he could not face the
+lights with this keen-eyed youngster.  He offered him money instead.
+
+"Just a lift," he said, awkwardly, when the boy hesitated.  "I've
+been there myself, lately."
+
+But when at last he had prevailed and turned away he was conscious
+that the doughboy was staring after him, puzzled and unconvinced.
+
+He had a bad night after that.  The encounter had brought back his
+hard-working, care-free days in the army.  It had brought back,
+too, the things he had put behind him, his profession and his joy
+in it, the struggles and the aspirations that constitute a man's
+life.  With them there came, too, a more real Elizabeth, and a
+wave of tenderness for her, and of regret.  He turned on his
+sagging bed, and deliberately put her away from him.  Even if this
+other ghost were laid, he had no right to her.
+
+Then, one day, he met Mrs. Sayre, and saw that she knew him.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+Wallie stared at his mother.  His mind was at once protesting the
+fact and accepting it, with its consequences to himself.  There
+was a perceptible pause before he spoke.  He stood, if anything,
+somewhat straighter, but that was all.
+
+"Are you sure it was Livingstone?"
+
+"Positive.  I talked to him.  I wasn't sure myself, at first.  He
+looked shabby and thin, as though he'd been ill, and he had the
+audacity to pretend at first he didn't know me.  He closed the
+door on me and--"
+
+"Wait a minute, mother.  What door?"
+
+"He was driving a taxicab."
+
+He looked at her incredulously.
+
+"I don't believe it," he said slowly.  "I think you've made a
+mistake, that's all."
+
+"Nonsense.  I know him as well as I know you."
+
+"Did he acknowledge his identity?"
+
+"Not in so many words," she admitted.  "He said I had made a mistake,
+and he stuck to it.  Then he shut the door and drove me to the
+station.  The only other chance I had was at the station, and there
+was a line of cabs behind us, so I had only a second.  I saw he
+didn't intend to admit anything, so I said: 'I can see you don't
+mean to recognize me, Doctor Livingstone, but I must know whether
+I am to say at home that I've seen you.' He was making change for
+me at the time--I'd have known his hands, I think, if I hadn't
+seen anything else-and when he looked up his face was shocking.
+He said, 'Are they all right?'  'David is very ill,' I said.
+The cars behind were waiting and making a terrific din, and
+a traffic man ran up then and made him move on.  He gave me the
+strangest look as he went.  I stood and waited, thinking he would
+turn and come back again at the end of the line, but he didn't.
+I almost missed my train."
+
+Wallie's first reaction to the news was one of burning anger and
+condemnation.
+
+"The blackguard!" he said.  "The insufferable cad! To have run
+away as he did, and then to let them believe him dead!  For that's
+what they do believe.  It is killing David Livingstone, and as for
+Elizabeth-- She'll have to be told, mother.  He's alive.  He's
+well.  And he has deliberately deserted them all.  He ought to
+be shot."
+
+"You didn't see him, Wallie.  I did.  He's been through something,
+I don't know what.  I didn't sleep last night for thinking of his
+face.  It had despair in it."
+
+"All right," he said, angrily pausing before her.  "What do you
+intend to do?  Let them go on as they are, hoping and waiting;
+lauding him to the skies as a sort of superman?  The thing to do
+is to tell the truth."
+
+"But we don't know the truth, Wallie.  There's something behind it
+all."
+
+"Nothing very creditable, be sure of that," he pronounced.  "Do you
+think it is fair to Elizabeth to let her waste her life on the
+memory of a man who's deserted her?"
+
+"It would be cruel to tell her."
+
+"You've got to be cruel to be kind, sometimes," he said oracularly.
+"Why, the man may be married.  May be anything.  A taxi driver!
+Doesn't that in itself show that he's hiding from something?"
+
+She sat, a small obese figure made larger by her furs, and stared
+at him with troubled eyes.
+
+"I don't know, Wallie," she said helplessly.  "In a way, it might
+be better to tell her.  She could put him out of her mind, then.
+But I hate to do it.  It's like stabbing a baby."
+
+He understood her, and nodded.  When, after taking a turn or two
+about the room he again stopped in front of her his angry flush
+had subsided.
+
+"It's the devil of a mess," he commented.  "I suppose the square
+thing to do is to tell Doctor David, and let him decide.  I've got
+too much at stake to be a judge of what to do."
+
+He went upstairs soon after that, leaving her still in her chair,
+swathed in furs, her round anxious face bent forward in thought.
+He had rarely seen her so troubled, so uncertain of her next move,
+and he surmised, knowing her, that her emotions were a complex of
+anxiety for himself with Elizabeth, of pity for David, and of the
+memory of Dick Livingstone's haggard face.
+
+She sat alone for some time and then went reluctantly up the
+stairs to her bedroom.  She felt, like Wallie, that she had too
+much at stake to decide easily what to do.
+
+In the end she decided to ask Doctor Reynolds' advice, and in the
+morning she proceeded to do it.  Reynolds was interested, even a
+little excited, she thought, but he thought it better not to tell
+David.  He would himself go to Harrison Miller with it.
+
+"You say he knew you?" he inquired, watching her.  "I suppose
+there is no doubt of that?"
+
+"Certainly not.  He's known me for years.  And he asked about David."
+
+"I see."  He fell into profound thought, while she sat in her chair
+a trifle annoyed with him.  He was wondering how all this would
+affect him and his prospects, and through them his right to marry.
+He had walked into a good thing, and into a very considerable content.
+
+"I see," he repeated, and got up.  "I'll tell Miller, and we'll get
+to work.  We are all very grateful to you, Mrs. Sayre--"
+
+As a result of that visit Harrison Miller and Bassett went that
+night to Chicago.  They left it to Doctor Reynolds' medical judgment
+whether David should be told or not, and Reynolds himself did not
+know.  In the end he passed the shuttle the next evening to Clare
+Rossiter.
+
+"Something's troubling you," she said.  "You're not a bit like
+yourself, old dear."
+
+He looked at her.  To him she was all that was fine and good and
+sane of judgment.
+
+"I've got something to settle," he said.  "I was wondering while
+you were singing, dear, whether you could help me out."
+
+"When I sing you're supposed to listen.  Well?  What is it?"  She
+perched herself on the arm of his chair, and ran her fingers over
+his hair.  She was very fond of him, and she meant to be a good
+wife.  If she ever thought of Dick Livingstone now it was in
+connection with her own reckless confession to Elizabeth.  She
+had hated Elizabeth ever since.
+
+"I'll take a hypothetical case.  If you guess, you needn't say.
+Of course it's a great secret."
+
+She listened, nodding now and then.  He used no names, and he said
+nothing of any crime.
+
+"The point is this," he finished.  "Is it better to believe the
+man is dead, or to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?"
+
+"There's no mistake about the recognition?"
+
+"Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago within  day or two,
+and talked to him."
+
+She had the whole picture in a moment.  She knew that Mrs. Sayre
+had been in Chicago, that she had seen Dick there and talked to him.
+She turned the matter over in her mind, shrewdly calculating,
+planning her small revenge on Elizabeth even as she talked.
+
+"I'd wait," she advised him.  "He may come back with them, and in
+that case David will know soon enough.  Or he may refuse to, and
+that would kill him.  He'd rather think him dead than that."
+
+She slept quietly that night, and spent rather more time than usual
+in dressing that morning.  Then she took her way to the Wheeler
+house.  She saw in what she was doing no particularly culpable
+thing.  She had no great revenge in mind; all that she intended
+was an evening of the score between them.  "He preferred you to me,
+when you knew I cared.  But he has deserted you."  And perhaps,
+too, a small present jealousy, for she was to live in the old
+brick Livingstone house, or in one like it, while all the village
+expected ultimately to see Elizabeth installed in the house on
+the hill.
+
+She kept her message to the end of her visit, and delivered her
+blow standing.
+
+"I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth.  But I don't know
+how you'll take it."
+
+"Maybe it's something I won't want to hear."
+
+"I'll tell you, if you won't say where you heard it."
+
+But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture.  "I don't like
+secrets, Clare.  I can't keep them, for one thing.  You'd better
+not tell me."
+
+Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.
+
+"All right," she said, and prepared to depart.  "I won't.  But you
+might just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw
+in Chicago this week."
+
+It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial, that the
+case against Dick was built up for Elizabeth.  Mrs. Sayre, helpless
+before her quiet questioning, had to acknowledge one damning thing
+after another.  He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth,
+but only for David; he looked tired and thin, but well.  She stood
+at the window watching Elizabeth go down the hill, with a feeling
+that she had just seen something die before her.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return  from
+Chicago Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news.
+
+At ten o'clock, according to her custom, she went up to see that
+David was comfortable for the night, and to read him that prayer
+for the absent with which he always closed his day of waiting.
+But before she went she stopped before the old mirror in the hall,
+to see if she wore any visible sign of tension.
+
+The door into Dick's office was open, and on his once neat desk
+there lay a litter of papers and letters.  She sighed and went
+up the stairs.
+
+David lay propped up in his walnut bed.  An incredibly wasted and
+old David; the hands on the log-cabin quilt which their mother had
+made were old hands, and tired.  Sometimes Lucy, with a frightened
+gasp, would fear that David's waiting now was not all for Dick.
+That he was waiting for peace.
+
+There had been something new in David lately.  She thought it was
+fear.  Always he had been so sure of himself; he had made his
+experiment in a man's soul, and whatever the result he had been
+ready to face his Creator with it.  But he had lost courage.  He
+had tampered with the things that were to be and not he, but Dick,
+was paying for that awful audacity.
+
+Once, picking up his prayer-book to read evening prayer as was her
+custom now, it had opened at a verse marked with an uneven line:
+
+"I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
+I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy
+to be called Thy son."
+
+That had frightened her
+
+David's eyes followed her about the room.
+
+"I've got an idea you're keeping something from me, Lucy."
+
+"I?  Why should I do that?"
+
+"Then where's Harrison?" he demanded, querulously.
+
+She told him one of the few white lies of her life when she said:
+"He hasn't been well.  He'll be over to-morrow."  She sat down and
+picked up the prayer-book, only to find him lifting himself in the
+bed and listening.
+
+"Somebody closed the hall door, Lucy.  If it's Reynolds, I want to
+see him."
+
+She got up and went to the head of the stairs.  The light was low
+in the hall beneath, and she saw a man standing there.  But she
+still wore her reading glasses, and she saw at first hardly more
+than a figure.
+
+"Is that you, Doctor Reynolds?" she asked, in her high old voice.
+
+Then she put her hand to her throat and stood rigid, staring down.
+For the man had whipped off his cap and stood with his arms wide,
+looking up.
+
+Holding to the stair-rail, her knees trembling under her, Lucy went
+down, and not until Dick's arms were around her was she sure that
+it was Dick, and not his shabby, weary ghost.  She clung to him,
+tears streaming down her face, still in that cautious silence which
+governed them both; she held him off and looked at him, and then
+strained herself to him again, as though the sense of unreality
+were too strong, and only the contact of his rough clothing made
+him real to her.
+
+It was not until they were in her sitting-room with the door closed
+that either of them dared to speak.  Or perhaps, could speak.  Even
+then she kept hold of him.
+
+"Dick!" she said.  "Dick!"
+
+And that, over and over.
+
+"How is he?" he was able to ask finally.
+
+"He has been very ill.  I began to think--Dick, I'm afraid to tell
+him.  I'm afraid he'll die of joy."
+
+He winced at that.  There could not be much joy in the farewell that
+was coming.  Winced, and almost staggered.  He had walked all the
+way from the city, and he had had no food that day.
+
+"We'll have to break it to him very gently," he said.  "And he
+mustn't see me like this.  If you can find some of my clothes and
+Reynolds' razor, I'll--"  He caught suddenly to the back of a
+chair and held on to it.  "I haven't taken time to eat much to-day,"
+he said, smiling at her.  "I guess I need food, Aunt Lucy."
+
+For the first time then she saw his clothes, his shabbiness and
+his pallor, and perhaps she guessed the truth.  She got up, her
+face twitching, and pushed him into a chair.
+
+"You sit here," she said, "and leave the door closed.  The nurse
+is out for a walk, and she'll be in soon.  I'll bring some milk and
+cookies now, and start the fire.  I've got some chops in the house."
+
+When she came back almost immediately, with the familiar tray and
+the familiar food, he was sitting where she had left him.  He had
+spent the entire time, had she known it, in impressing on his mind
+the familiar details of the room, to carry away with him.
+
+She stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, to see that he drank
+the milk slowly.
+
+"I've got the fire going," she said.  "And I'll run up now and get
+your clothes.  I--had put them away."  Her voice broke a little.
+"You see, we-- You can change in your laboratory.  Richard, can't
+you?  If you go upstairs he'll hear you."
+
+He reached up and caught her hand.  That touch, too, of the nearest
+to a mother's hand that he had known, he meant to carry away with
+him.  He could not speak.
+
+She bustled away, into her bright kitchen first, and then with
+happy stealth to the store-room.  Her very heart was singing within
+her.  She neither thought nor reasoned.  Dick was back, and all
+would be well.  If she had any subconscious anxieties they were
+quieted, also subconsciously, by confidence in the men who were
+fighting his battle for him, by Walter Wheeler and Bassett and
+Harrison Miller.  That Dick himself would present any difficulty
+lay beyond her worst fears.
+
+She had been out of the room only twenty minutes when she returned
+to David and prepared to break her great news.  At first she thought
+he was asleep.  He was lying back with his eyes closed and his hands
+crossed on the prayer-book.  But he looked up at her, and was
+instantly roused to full attention by her face.
+
+"You've had some news," he said.
+
+"Yes, David.  There's a little news.  Don't count too much on it.
+Don't sit up.  David, I have heard something that makes me think he
+is alive.  Alive and well."
+
+He made a desperate effort and controlled himself.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+She sat down beside him and took his hand between hers.
+
+"David," she said slowly, "God has been very good to us.  I want to
+tell you something, and I want you to prepare yourself.  We have
+heard from Dick.  He is all right.  He loves us, as he always did.
+And--he is downstairs, David."
+
+He lay very still and without speaking.  She was frightened at
+first, afraid to go on with her further news.  But suddenly David
+sat up in bed and in a full, firm voice began the Te Deum Laudamus.
+"We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.  All
+the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting."
+
+He repeated it in its entirety.  At the end, however, his voice broke.
+
+"O Lord, in thee have I trusted--I doubted Him, Lucy," he said.
+
+Dick, waiting at the foot of the stairs, heard that triumphant paean
+of thanksgiving and praise and closed his eyes.
+
+It was a few minutes later that Lucy came down the stairs again.
+
+"You heard him?" she asked.  "Oh, Dick, he had frightened me.  It
+was more than a question of himself and you.  He was making it one
+of himself and God."
+
+She let him go up alone and waited below, straining her ears, but
+she heard nothing beyond David's first hoarse cry, and after a
+little she went into her sitting-room and shut the door.
+
+Whatever lay underneath, there was no surface drama in the meeting.
+The determination to ignore any tragedy in the situation was strong
+in them both, and if David's eyes were blurred and his hands
+trembling, if Dick's first words were rather choked, they hid their
+emotion carefully.
+
+"Well, here I am, like a bad penny!" said Dick huskily from the
+doorway.
+
+"And a long time you've been about it," grumbled David.  "You young
+rascal!"
+
+He held out his hand, and Dick crushed it between both of his.  He
+was startled at the change in David.  For a moment he could only
+stand there, holding his hand, and trying to keep his apprehension
+out of his face.
+
+"Sit down," David said awkwardly, and blew his nose with a terrific
+blast.  "I've been laid up for a while, but I'm all right now.  I'll
+fool them all yet," he boasted, out of his happiness and content.
+"Business has been going to the dogs, Dick.  Reynolds is a fool."
+
+"Of course you'll fool them."  There was still a band around Dick's
+throat.  It hurt him to look at David, so thin and feeble, so sunken
+from his former portliness.  And David saw his eyes, and knew.
+
+"I've dropped a little flesh, eh, Dick?" he inquired.  "Old bulge
+is gone, you see.  The nurse makes up the bed when I'm in it, flat
+as when I'm out."
+
+Suddenly his composure broke.  He was a feeble and apprehensive old
+man, shaken with the tearless sobbing of weakness and age.  Dick put
+an arm across his shoulders, and they sat without speech until
+David was quiet again.
+
+"I'm a crying old woman, Dick," David said at last.  "That's what
+comes of never feeling a pair of pants on your legs and being
+coddled like a baby."  He sat up and stared around him ferociously.
+"They sprinkle violet water on my pillows, Dick!  Can you beat that?"
+
+Warned by Lucy, the nurse went to her room and did not disturb them.
+But she sat for a time in her rocking-chair, before she changed
+into the nightgown and kimono in which she slept on the couch in
+David's room.  She knew the story, and her kindly heart ached
+within her.  What good would it do after all, this home-coming?
+Dick could not stay.  It was even dangerous.  Reynolds had confided
+to her that he suspected a watch on the house by the police, and
+that the mail was being opened.  What good was it?
+
+Across the hall she could hear Lucy moving briskly about in Dick's
+room, changing the bedding, throwing up the windows, opening and
+closing bureau drawers.  After a time Lucy tapped at her door and
+she opened it.
+
+"I put a cake of scented soap among your handkerchiefs," she said,
+rather breathlessly.  "Will you let me have it for Doctor Dick's
+room?"
+
+She got the soap and gave it to her.
+
+"He is going to stay, then?"
+
+"Certainly he is going to stay," Lucy said, surprised.  "This is
+his home.  Where else should he go?"
+
+But David knew.  He lay, listening with avid interest to Dick's
+story, asking a question now and then, nodding over Dick's halting
+attempt to reconstruct the period of his confusion, but all the
+time one part of him, a keen and relentless inner voice, was saying:
+"Look at him well.  Hold him close.  Listen to his voice.  Because
+this hour is yours, and perhaps only this hour."
+
+"Then the Sayre woman doesn't know about your coming?" he asked,
+when Dick had finished.
+
+"Still, she mustn't talk about having seen you.  I'll send Reynolds
+up in the morning."
+
+He was eager to hear of what had occurred in the long interval
+between them, and good, bad and indifferent Dick told him.  But he
+limited himself to events, and did not touch on his mental battles,
+and David saw and noted it.  The real story, he knew, lay there,
+but it was not time for it.  After a while he raised himself in
+his bed.
+
+"Call Lucy, Dick."
+
+When she had come, a strangely younger Lucy, her withered cheeks
+flushed with exercise and excitement, he said:
+
+"Bring me the copy of the statement I made to Harrison Miller, Lucy."
+
+She brought it, patted Dick's shoulder, and went away.  David held
+out the paper.
+
+"Read it slowly, boy," he said.  "It is my justification, and God
+willing, it may help you.  The letter is from my brother, Henry.
+Read that, too."
+
+Lucy, having got Dick's room in readiness, sat down in it to await
+his coming.  Downstairs, in the warming oven, was his supper.  His
+bed, with the best blankets, was turned down and ready.  His
+dressing-gown and slippers were in their old accustomed place.  She
+drew a long breath.
+
+Below, Doctor Reynolds came in quietly and stood listening.  The
+house was very still, and he decided that his news, which was after
+all no news, could wait.  He went into the office and got out a
+sheet of note-paper, with his name at the top, and began his nightly
+letter to Clare Rossiter.
+
+"My darling," it commenced.
+
+Above, David lay in his bed and Dick read the papers in his hand.
+And as he read them David watched him.  Not once, since Dick's
+entrance, had he mentioned Elizabeth.  David lay still and pondered
+that.  There was something wrong about it.  This was Dick, their
+own Dick; no shadowy ghost of the past, but Dick himself.  True, an
+older Dick, strangely haggard and with gray running in the brown of
+his hair, but still Dick; the Dick whose eyes had lighted at the
+sight of a girl, who had shamelessly persisted in holding her hand
+at that last dinner, who had almost idolatrously loved her.
+
+And he had not mentioned her name.
+
+When he had finished the reading Dick sat for a moment with the
+papers in his hand, thinking.
+
+"I see," he said finally.  "Of course, it's possible.  Good God, if
+I could only think it."
+
+"It's the answer," David said stubbornly.  "He was prowling around,
+and fired through the window.  Donaldson made the statement at the
+inquest that some one had been seen on the place, and that he
+notified you that night after dinner.  He'd put guards around the
+place."
+
+"It gives me a fighting chance, anyhow."  Dick got up and threw
+back his shoulders.  "That's all I want.  A chance to fight.  I
+know this.  I hated Lucas--he was a poor thing and you know what
+he did to me.  But I never thought of killing him.  That wouldn't
+have helped matters.  It was too late."
+
+"What about--that?" David asked, not looking at him.  When Dick
+did not immediately reply David glanced at him, to find his face
+set and pained.
+
+"Perhaps we'd better not go into that now," David said hastily.
+"It's natural that the readjustments will take time."
+
+"We'll have to go into it.  It's the hardest thing I have to face."
+
+"It's not dead, then?"
+
+"No," Dick said slowly.  "It's not dead, David.  And I'd better
+bring it into the open.  I've fought it to the limit by myself.
+It's the one thing that seems to have survived the shipwreck.  I
+can't argue it down or think it down."
+
+"Maybe, if you see Elizabeth--"
+
+"I'd break her heart, that's all."
+
+He tried to make David understand.  He told in its sordid details
+his failure to kill it, his attempts to sink memory and conscience
+in Chicago and their failure, the continued remoteness of Elizabeth
+and what seemed to him the flesh and blood reality of the other
+woman.  That she was yesterday, and Elizabeth was long ago.
+
+"I can't argue it down," he finished.  "I've tried to, desperately.
+It's a--I think it's a wicked thing, in a way.  And God knows all
+she ever got out of it was suffering.  She must loathe the thought
+of me."
+
+David was compelled to let it rest there.  He found that Dick was
+doggedly determined to see Beverly Carlysle.  After that, he didn't
+know.  No man wanted to surrender himself for trial, unless he was
+sure himself of whether he was innocent or guilty.  If there was a
+reasonable doubt--but what did it matter one way or the other?
+His place was gone, as he'd made it, gone if he was cleared, gone
+if he was convicted.
+
+"I can't come back, David.  They wouldn't have me."
+
+After a silence he asked:
+
+"How much is known here?  What does Elizabeth know?"
+
+"The town knows nothing.  She knows a part of it.  She cares a great
+deal, Dick.  It's a tragedy for her."
+
+"Shall you tell her I have been here?"
+
+"Not unless you intend to see her."
+
+But Dick shook his head.
+
+"Even if other things were the same I haven't a right to see her,
+until I've got a clean slate."
+
+"That's sheer evasion," David said, almost with irritation.
+
+"Yes," Dick acknowledged gravely.  "It is sheer evasion."
+
+"What about the police?" he inquired after a silence.  "I was
+registered at Norada.  I suppose they traced me?"
+
+"Yes.  The house was watched for a while; I understand they've
+given it up now."
+
+In response to questions about his own condition David was almost
+querulous.  He was all right.  He would get well if they'd let him,
+and stop coddling him.  He would get up now, in spite of them.  He
+was good for one more fight before he died, and he intended to make
+it, in a court if necessary.
+
+"They can't prove it, Dick," he said triumphantly.  "I've been over
+it every day for months.  There is no case.  There never was a case,
+for that matter.  They're a lot of pin-headed fools, and we'll show
+them up, boy.  We'll show them up."
+
+But for all his excitement fatigue was telling on him.  Lucy tapped
+at the door and came in.
+
+"You'd better have your supper before it spoils," she said.  "And
+David needs a rest.  Doctor Reynolds is in the office.  I haven't
+told him yet."
+
+The two men exchanged glances.
+
+"Time for that later," David said.  "I can't keep him out of my
+office, but I can out of my family affairs for an hour or so."
+
+
+So it happened that Dick followed Lucy down the back stairs and ate
+his meal stealthily in the kitchen.
+
+"I don't like you to eat here," she protested.
+
+"I've eaten in worse places," he said, smiling at her.  "And
+sometimes not at all."  He was immediately sorry for that, for
+the tears came to her eyes.
+
+He broke as gently as he could the news that he could not stay, but
+it was a great blow to her.  Her sagging chin quivered piteously,
+and it took all the cheerfulness he could summon and all the
+promises of return he could make to soften the shock.
+
+"You haven't even seen Elizabeth," she said at last.
+
+"That will have to wait until things are cleared up, Aunt Lucy."
+
+"Won't you write her something then, Richard?  She looks like a
+ghost these days."
+
+Her eyes were on him, puzzled and wistful.  He met them gravely.
+
+"I haven't the right to see her, or to write to her."
+
+And the finality in his tone closed the discussion, that and
+something very close to despair in his face.
+
+For all his earlier hunger he ate very little, and soon after he
+tiptoed up the stairs again to David's room.  When he came down to
+the kitchen later on he found her still there, at the table where
+he had left her, her arms across it and her face buried in them.
+On a chair was the suitcase she had hastily packed for him, and a
+roll of bills lay on the table.
+
+"You must take it," she insisted.  "It breaks my heart to think--
+Dick, I have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last time."
+Then for fear she had hurt him she forced a determined smile.  "Don't
+pay any attention to me.  David will tell you that I have said, over
+and over, that I'd never see you again.  And here you are!"
+
+He was going.  He had said good-bye to David and was going at once.
+She accepted it with a stoicism born of many years of hail and
+farewell, kissed him tenderly, let her hand linger for a moment on
+the rough sleeve of his coat, and then let him out by the kitchen
+door into the yard.  But long after he had gone she stood in the
+doorway, staring out...
+
+In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long and carefully
+written letter.
+
+"I am not good at putting myself on paper, as you know, dear heart.
+But this I do know.  I do not believe that real love dies.  We may
+bury it, so deep that it seems to be entirely dead, but some day it
+sends up a shoot, and it either lives, or the business of killing
+it has to be begun all over again.  So when we quarrel, I always
+know--"
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+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.
+
+Yet, for a man who did not love, he was oddly angry at the sight
+of two young figures on the doorstep.  Their clear voices came to
+him across the quiet street, vibrant and full of youth.  It was
+the Sayre boy and Elizabeth.
+
+He half stopped, and looked across.  They were quite oblivious of
+him, intent and self-absorbed.  As he had viewed Reynolds'
+unconscious figure with jealous dislike, so he viewed Wallace Sayre.
+Here, everywhere, his place was filled.  He was angry with an
+unreasoning, inexplicable anger, angry at Elizabeth, angry at the
+boy, and at himself.
+
+He had but to cross the street and take his place there.  He could
+drive that beardless youngster away with a word.  The furious
+possessive jealousy of the male animal, which had nothing to do
+with love, made him stop and draw himself up as he stared across.
+
+Then he smiled wryly and went on.  He could do it, but he did not
+want to.  He would never do it.  Let them live their lives, and let
+him live his.  But he knew that there, across the street, so near
+that he might have raised his voice and summoned her, he was leaving
+the best thing that had come into his life; the one fine and good
+thing, outside of David and Lucy.  That against its loss he had
+nothing but an infatuation that had ruined three lives already, and
+was not yet finished.
+
+He stopped and, turning, looked back.  He saw the girl bend down
+and put a hand on Wallie Sayre's shoulder, and the boy's face
+upturned and looking into hers.  He shook himself and went on.
+After all, that was best.  He felt no anger now.  She deserved
+better than to be used to help a man work out his salvation.  She
+deserved youth, and joyousness, and the forgetfulness that comes
+with time.  She was already forgetting.
+
+He smiled again as he went on up the street, but his hands as he
+buttoned his overcoat were shaking.
+
+It was shortly after that that he met the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe.
+He passed him quickly, but he was conscious that the clergyman had
+stopped and was staring after him.  Half an hour later, sitting in
+the empty smoker of the train, he wondered if he had not missed
+something there.  Perhaps the church could have helped him, a good
+man's simple belief in right and wrong.  He was wandering in a
+gray no-man's land, without faith or compass.
+
+David had given him the location of Bassett's apartment house, and
+he found it quickly.  He was in a state of nervous irritability by
+that time, for the sense of being a fugitive was constantly
+stressed in the familiar streets by the danger of recognition.  It
+was in vain that he argued with himself that only the police were
+interested in his movements, and the casual roundsman not at all.
+He found himself shying away from them like a nervous horse.
+
+But if he expected any surprise from Bassett he was disappointed.
+He greeted him as if he had seen him yesterday, and explained his
+lack of amazement in his first words.
+
+"Doctor Livingstone telephoned me.  Sit down, man, and let me look
+at you.  You've given me more trouble than any human being on earth."
+
+"Sorry," Dick said awkwardly, "I seem to have a faculty of involving
+other people in my difficulties."
+
+"Want a drink?"
+
+"No, thanks.  I'll smoke, if you have any tobacco.  I've been afraid
+to risk a shop."
+
+Bassett talked cheerfully as he found cigarettes and matches.  "The
+old boy had a different ring to his voice to-night.  He was going
+down pretty fast, Livingstone; was giving up the fight.  But I fancy
+you've given him a new grip on the earth."  When they were seated,
+however, a sort of awkwardness developed.  To Dick, Bassett had been
+a more or less shadowy memory, clouded over with the details and
+miseries of the flight.  And Bassett found Dick greatly altered.  He
+was older than he remembered him.  The sort of boyishness which had
+come with the resurrection of his early identity had gone, and the
+man who sat before him was grave, weary, and much older.  But his
+gaze was clear and direct.
+
+"Well, a good bit of water has gone over the dam since we met,"
+Bassett said.  "I nearly broke a leg going down that infernal
+mountain again.  And I don't mind telling you that I came within
+an ace of landing in the Norada jail.  They knew I'd helped you get
+away.  But they couldn't prove it."
+
+"I got out, because I didn't see any need of dragging you down with
+me.  I was a good bit of a mess just then, but I could reason that
+out, anyhow.  It wasn't entirely unselfish, either.  I had a better
+chance without you.  Or thought I did."
+
+Bassett was watching him intently.
+
+"Has it all come back?" he inquired.
+
+"Practically all.  Not much between the thing that happened at the
+ranch and David Livingstone's picking me up at the cabin."
+
+"Did it ever occur to you to wonder just how I got in on your
+secret?"
+
+"I suppose you read Maggie Donaldson's confession."
+
+"I came to see you before that came out."
+
+"Then I don't know, I'm afraid."
+
+"I suppose you would stake your life on the fact that Beverly
+Carlysle knows nothing of what happened that night at the ranch?"
+
+Dick's face twitched, but he returned Bassett's gaze steadily.
+
+"She has no criminal knowledge, if that is what you mean."
+
+"I am not so sure of it."
+
+"I think you'd better explain that."
+
+At the cold anger in Dick's voice Bassett stared at him.  So that
+was how the wind lay.  Poor devil!  And out of the smug complacence
+of his bachelor peace Bassett thanked his stars for no women in his
+life.
+
+"I'm afraid you misunderstand me, Livingstone," he said easily.
+"I don't think that she shot Lucas.  But I don't think she has ever
+told all she knows.  I've got the coroner's inquest here, and we'll
+go over it later.  I'll tell you how I got onto your trail.  Do you
+remember taking Elizabeth Wheeler to see 'The Valley?'"
+
+"I had forgotten it.  I remember now."
+
+"Well, Gregory, the brother, saw you and recognized you.  I was
+with him.  He tried to deny you later, but I was on.  Of course he
+told her, and I think she sent him to warn David Livingstone.  They
+knew I was on the trail of a big story.  Then I think Gregory
+stayed here to watch me when the company made its next jump.  He
+knew I'd started, for he sent David Livingstone the letter you got.
+By the way, that letter nearly got me jailed in Norada."
+
+"I'm not hiding behind her skirts," Dick said shortly.  "And there's
+nothing incriminating in what you say.  She saw me as a fugitive,
+and she sent me a warning.  That's all."
+
+"Easy, easy, old man.  I'm not pinning anything on her.  But I want,
+if you don't mind, to carry this through.  I have every reason to
+believe that, some time before you got to Norada, the Thorwald woman
+was on my trail.  I know that I was followed to the cabin the night
+I stayed there, and that she got a saddle horse from her son that
+night, her son by Thorwald, either for herself or some one else."
+
+"All right.  I accept that, tentatively."
+
+"That means that she knew I was coming to Norada.  Think a minute;
+I'd kept my movements quiet, but Beverly Carlysle knew, and her
+brother.  When they warned David they warned her."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"If you had killed Lucas," Bassett asserted positively, "the
+Thorwald woman would have let the sheriff get you, and be damned
+to you.  She had no reason to love you.  You'd kept her son out of
+what she felt was his birthright."
+
+He got up and opened a table drawer.
+
+"I've got a copy of the coroner's inquest here.  It will bear
+going over.  And it may help you to remember, too.  We needn't
+read it all.  There's a lot that isn't pertinent."
+
+He got out a long envelope, and took from it a number of typed
+pages, backed with a base of heavy paper.
+
+"'Inquest in the Coroner's office on the body of Howard Lucas,'"
+he read.  "'October 10th, 1911.' That was the second day after.
+'Examination of witnesses by Coroner Samuel J.  Burkhardt.  Mrs.
+Lucas called and sworn.'" He glanced at Dick and hesitated.  "I
+don't know about this to-night, Livingstone.  You look pretty well
+shot to pieces."
+
+"I didn't sleep last night.  I'm all right.  Go on."
+
+During the reading that followed he sat back in his deep chair, his
+eyes closed.  Except that once or twice he clenched his hands he
+made no movement whatever.
+
+Q.  "What is your name?"
+
+A.  "Anne Elizabeth Lucas.  My stage name is Beverly Carlysle."
+
+Q.  "Where do you live, Mrs. Lucas?"
+
+A.  "At 26 East 56th Street, New York City."
+
+Q.  "I shall have to ask you some questions that are necessarily
+  painful at this time.  I shall be as brief as possible.
+  Perhaps it will be easier for you to tell so much as you know
+  of what happened the night before last at the Clark ranch."
+
+A.  "I cannot tell very much.  I am confused, too.  I was given
+  a sleeping powder last night.  I can only say that I heard a
+  shot, and thought at first that it was fired from outside.
+  I ran down the stairs, and back to the billiard room.  As I
+  entered the room Mr. Donaldson came in through a window.  My
+  husband was lying on the floor.  That is all."
+
+Q.  "Where was Judson Clark?"
+
+A.  "He was leaning on the roulette table, staring at the--at
+  my husband."
+
+Q.  "Did you see him leave the room?"
+
+A.  "No.  I was on my knees beside Mr. Lucas.  I think when I got
+  up he was gone.  I didn't notice."
+
+Q.  "Did you see a revolver?"
+
+A.  "No.  I didn't look for one."
+
+Q.  "Now I shall ask you one more question, and that is all.  Had
+  there been any quarrel between Mr. Lucas and Mr. Clark that
+  evening in your presence?"
+
+A.  "No.  But I had quarreled with them both.  They were drinking
+  too much.  I had gone to my room to pack and go home.  I was
+  packing when I heard the shot."
+
+
+Witness excused and Mr. John Donaldson called.
+
+Q.  "What is your name?"
+
+A.  "John Donaldson."
+
+Q.  "Where do you live?"
+
+A.  "At the Clark ranch."
+
+Q.  "What is your business?"
+
+A.  "You know all about me.  I'm foreman of the ranch."
+
+Q.  "I want you to tell what you know, Jack, about last night.
+  Begin with where you were when you heard the shot."
+
+A.  "I was on the side porch.  The billiard room opens on to it.
+  I'd been told by the corral boss earlier in the  evening that
+  he'd seen a man skulking around the house.  There'd been a
+  report like that once or twice before, and I set a watch.  I
+  put Ben Haggerty at the kitchen wing with a gun, and I took
+  up a stand on the porch.  Before I did that I told Judson,
+  but I don't think he took it in.  He'd been lit up like a
+  house afire all evening.  I asked for his gun, but he said
+  he didn't know where it was, and I went back to my house and
+  got my own.  Along about eight o'clock I thought I saw some
+  one in the shrubbery, and I went out as quietly as I could.
+  But it was a woman, Hattie Thorwald, who was working at the
+  ranch.
+
+  "When I left the men were playing roulette.  I looked in as
+  I went back, and Judson had a gun in his hand.  He said; 'I
+  found it, Jack.' I saw he was very drunk, and I told him to
+  put it up, I'd got mine.  It had occurred to me that I'd
+  better warn Haggerty to be careful, and I started along the
+  verandah to tell him not to shoot except to scare.  I had
+  only gone a few steps when I heard a shot, and ran back.  Mr.
+  Lucas was on the floor dead, and Judson was as the lady said.
+  He must have gone out while I was bending over the body."
+
+Q.  "Did you see the revolver in his hand?"
+
+A.  "No."
+
+Q.  "How long between your warning Mr. Clark and the shot?"
+
+A.  "I suppose I'd gone a dozen yards."
+
+Q.  "Were you present when the revolver was found?"
+
+A.  "No, sir."
+
+Q.  "Did you see Judson Clark again?"
+
+A.  "No, sir.  From what I gather he went straight to the corral
+  and got his horse."
+
+Q.  "You entered the room as Mrs. Lucas came in the door?"
+
+A.  "Well, she's wrong about that.  She was there a little ahead
+  of me.  She'd reached the body before I got in.  She was
+  stooping over it."
+
+Bassett looked up from his reading.
+
+"I want you to get this, Livingstone," he said.  "How did she reach
+the billiard room?  Where was it in the house?"
+
+"Off the end of the living-room."
+
+"A large living-room?"
+
+"Forty or forty-five feet, about."
+
+"Will you draw it for me, roughly?"
+
+He passed over a pad and pencil, and Dick made a hasty outline.
+Bassett watched with growing satisfaction.
+
+"Here's the point," he said, when Dick had finished.  "She was there
+before Donaldson, or at the same time," as Dick made an impatient
+movement.  "But he had only a dozen yards to go.  She was in her
+room, upstairs.  To get down in that time she had to leave her room,
+descend a staircase, cross a hall and run the length of the
+living-room, forty-five feet.  If the case had ever gone to trial
+she'd have had to do some explaining."
+
+"She or Donaldson," Dick said obstinately.
+
+Bassett read on:
+
+Jean Melis called and sworn.
+
+Q.  "Your name?"
+
+A.  "Jean Melis."
+
+Q.  "Have you an American residence, Mr. Melis?"
+
+A.  "Only where I am employed.  I am now living at the Clark
+  ranch."
+
+Q.  "What is your business?"
+
+A.  "I am Mr. Clark's valet."
+
+Q.  "It was you who found Mr. Clark's revolver?"
+
+A.  "Yes."
+
+Q.  "Tell about how and where you found it."
+
+A.  "I made a search early in the evening.  I will not hide from
+you that I meant to conceal it if I discovered it.  A man who is
+drunk is not guilty of what he does.  I did not find it.  I went
+back that night, when the people had gone, and found it beneath
+the carved woodbox, by the fireplace.  I did not know that the
+sheriff had placed a man outside the window."
+
+"Get that, too," Bassett said, putting down the paper.  "The
+Frenchman was fond of you, and he was doing his blundering best.
+But the sheriff expected you back and had had the place watched,
+so they caught him.  But that's not the point.  A billiard room
+is a hard place to hide things in.  I take it yours was like the
+average."
+
+Dick nodded.
+
+"All right.  This poor boob of a valet made a search and didn't
+find it.  Later he found it.  Why did he search? Wasn't it the
+likely thing that you'd carried it away with you?  Do you suppose
+for a moment that with Donaldson and the woman in the room you hid
+it there, and then went back and stood behind the roulette table,
+leaning on it with both hands, and staring?  Not at all.  Listen to
+this:
+
+Q.  "You recognize this revolver as the one you found?"
+
+A.  "Yes."
+
+Q.  "You are familiar with it?"
+
+A.  "Yes.  It is Mr. Clark's."
+
+Q.  "You made the second search because you had not examined the
+  woodbox earlier?"
+
+A.  "No.  I had examined the woodbox.  I had a theory that--"
+
+Q.  "The Jury cannot listen to any theories.  This is an inquiry
+  into facts."
+
+"I'm going to find Melis," the reporter said thoughtfully, as he
+folded up the papers.  "The fact is, I mailed an advertisement to
+the New York papers to-day.  I want to get that theory of his.  It's
+the servants in the house who know what is going on.  I've got an
+idea that he'd stumbled onto something.  He'd searched for the
+revolver, and it wasn't there.  He went back and it was.  All that
+conflicting evidence, and against it, what?  That you'd run away!"
+
+But he saw that Dick was very tired, and even a little indifferent.
+He would be glad to know that his hands were clean, but against the
+intimation that Beverly Carlysle had known more than she had
+disclosed he presented a dogged front of opposition.  After a time
+Bassett put the papers away and essayed more general conversation,
+and there he found himself met half way and more.  He began to get
+Dick as a man, for the first time, and as a strong man.  He watched
+his quiet, lined face, and surmised behind it depths of tenderness
+and gentleness.  No wonder the little Wheeler girl had worshipped him.
+
+It was settled that Dick was to spend the night there, and such
+plans as he had Bassett left until morning.  But while he was
+unfolding the bed-lounge on which Dick was to sleep, Dick opened a
+line of discussion that cost the reporter an hour or two's sleep
+before he could suppress his irritation.
+
+"I must have caused you considerable outlay, one way and another,"
+he said.  "I want to defray that, Bassett, as soon as I've figured
+out some way to get at my bank account."
+
+Bassett jerked out a pillow and thumped it.
+
+"Forget it." Then he grinned.  "You can fix that when you get your
+estate, old man.  Buy a newspaper and let me run it!"
+
+He bent over the davenport and put the pillow in place.  "All you'll
+have to do is to establish your identity.  The institutions that got
+it had to give bond.  I hope you're not too long for this bed."
+
+But he looked up at Dick's silence, to see him looking at him with a
+faint air of amusement over his pipe.
+
+"They're going to keep the money, Bassett."
+
+Bassett straightened and stared at him.
+
+"Don't be a damned fool," he protested.  "It's your money.  Don't
+tell me you're going to give it to suffering humanity.  That sort
+of drivel makes me sick.  Take it, give it away if you like, but
+for God's sake don't shirk your job."
+
+Dick got up and took a turn or two around the room.  Then, after
+an old habit, he went to the window and stood looking out, but
+seeing nothing.
+
+"It's not that, Bassett.  I'm afraid of the accursed thing.  I
+might talk a lot of rot about wanting to work with my hands.  I
+wouldn't if I didn't have to, any more than the next fellow.  I
+might fool myself, too, with thinking I could work better without
+any money worries.  But I've got to remember this.  It took work
+to make a man of me before, and it will take work to keep me going
+the way I intend to go, if I get my freedom."
+
+Sometime during the night Bassett saw that the light was still
+burning by the davenport, and went in.  Dick was asleep with a
+volume of Whitman open on his chest, and Bassett saw what he had
+been reading.
+
+"You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you short-lived ennuis;
+Ah, think not you shall finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth.
+It shall march forth over-mastering, till all lie beneath me,
+It shall stand up, the soldier of unquestioned victory."
+
+Bassett took the book away and stood rereading the paragraph.  For
+the first time he sensed the struggle going on at that time behind
+Dick's quiet face, and he wondered.  Unquestioned victory, eh?
+That was a pretty large order.
+
+
+
+
+XL
+
+Leslie Ward had found the autumn extremely tedious.  His old
+passion for Nina now and then flamed up in him, but her occasional
+coquetries no longer deceived him.  They had their source only in
+her vanity.  She exacted his embraces only as tribute to her own
+charm, her youth, her fresh young body.
+
+And Nina out of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping piano, of
+chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing and bridge and theater
+boxes, was a queen dethroned.  She did not read or think.  She
+spent the leisure of her mourning period in long hours before her
+mirror fussing with her hair, in trimming and retrimming hats, or
+in the fastidious care of her hands and body.
+
+He was ashamed sometimes of his pitilessly clear analysis of her.
+She was not discontented, save at the enforced somberness of their
+lives.  She had found in marriage what she wanted; a good house,
+daintily served; a man to respond to her attractions as a woman,
+and to provide for her needs as a wife; dignity and an established
+place in the world; liberty and privilege.
+
+But she was restless.  She chafed at the quiet evenings they spent
+at home, and resented the reading in which he took refuge from her
+uneasy fidgeting.
+
+"For Heaven's sake, Nina, sit down and read or sew, or do something.
+You've been at that window a dozen times."
+
+"I'm not bothering you.  Go on and read."
+
+When nobody dropped in she would go upstairs and spend the hour or
+so before bedtime in the rites of cold cream, massage, and in
+placing the little combs of what Leslie had learned was called a
+water-wave.
+
+But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the
+difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she
+accepted the situation.  She was cleverer than he was; her mind
+worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked.  If
+there were times when she wearied him, there were others when he
+sickened her.  Across from her at the table he ate slowly and
+enormously.  He splashed her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping
+cold baths.  He flung his soiled clothing anywhere.  He drank
+whisky at night and crawled into the lavender-scented sheets
+redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and snore until she
+wanted to scream.  But she played the game to the limit of her
+ability.
+
+Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant
+effort, and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet
+him half way.  They played two-handed card games.  He read aloud to
+her, poetry which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he
+hated.  He suggested country walks and she agreed, to limp back
+after a half mile or so in her high-heeled pumps.
+
+He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he
+lay awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future
+of unnumbered blank evenings.  He had formerly taken an occasional
+evening at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would
+fill with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned
+Beverly Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him
+again.  And in his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.
+
+He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there
+were times when he knew he lied to himself.  One fiction, however,
+he persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly.  It was
+only that she gave him during those few days something he had not
+found at home, companionship and quiet intelligent talk.  She had
+been restful.  Nina was never restful.
+
+He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train.  "The
+Valley" had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a
+long run.  The reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and
+when now and then she gave an interview he studied the photographs
+accompanying it.  But he never carried the paper home.
+
+He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York.
+He would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see
+her before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph.
+There were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his
+desk with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations
+of the excursion by some manipulation of business interests.  For
+months, however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.
+
+But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for
+going, and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of
+circumstance this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was
+connected with Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark.  The
+discovery, communicated to him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was
+Clark had roused in him a totally different feeling from Nina's.
+He saw no glamour of great wealth.  On the contrary, he saw in
+Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman who had not
+deserved it.  And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy, surmised
+even that.
+
+That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past,
+he denied to himself absolutely.  But his resentment took the form
+of violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth
+to have anything to do with Dick if he turned up.
+
+"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and
+he'll come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and
+they're just fool enough to fall for it."
+
+"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."
+
+Before her appraising eyes his own fell.
+
+"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such
+a story, would you believe it?"
+
+"No.  When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear
+to need any excuse."
+
+But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough.
+They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death
+they tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual
+concessions.  What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded
+with Beverly Carlysle.  Not that the correspondence amounted to much.
+He had sent her flowers the night of the New York opening, with the
+name of his club on his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment.
+Then, later, twice he sent her books, one a biography, which was a
+compromise with his conscience, and later a volume of exotic love
+verse, which was not.  As he replied to her notes of thanks a
+desultory correspondence had sprung up, letters which the world
+might have read, and yet which had to him the savor and interest
+of the clandestine.
+
+He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his
+desire to see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was
+demonstrating to himself that his adventurous love life was not
+necessarily ended; never acknowledged that the instinct of the
+hunter was as alive in him as in the days before his marriage.
+Partly, then, a desire for adventure, partly a hope that romance
+was not over but might still be waiting around the next corner,
+was behind his desire to see her again.
+
+Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had
+taken to reading poetry, for instance.  Certain it is that when he
+began, early in October, to throw out small tentative remarks about
+the necessity of a business trip before long to New York, she
+narrowed her eyes.  She was determined to go with him, if he went
+at all, and he was equally determined that she should not.
+
+It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides.
+Then there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie
+took up the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the
+pattern.  It happened to be on the same evening as Dick's return
+to the old house.
+
+He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.
+
+"Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?" he asked.  He
+was lighting a cigarette at the time.
+
+"Yes.  Why?"
+
+"I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow.  I wanted Joe to go
+alone, but he thinks he needs me." Joe was his partner.  "Oh.  So
+Joe's going?"
+
+"That's what I said."
+
+She was silent.  Joe's going was clever of him.  It gave authenticity
+to his business, and it kept her at home.
+
+"How long shall you be gone?"
+
+"Only a day or two." He could not entirely keep the relief out of
+his voice.  It had been easy, incredibly easy.  He might have done
+it a month ago.  And he had told the truth; Joe was going.
+
+"I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning."
+
+"If you'll get your things out I'll pack them." She was still
+thinking, but her tone was indifferent.  "You won't want your dress
+clothes, of course."
+
+"I'd better have a dinner suit."
+
+She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile.  "Yes," she
+said slowly.  "I suppose you will.  You'll be going to the theater."
+
+He glanced away.
+
+"Possibly.  But we'll be rushing to get through.  There's a lot to
+do.  Amazing how business piles up when you find you're going
+anywhere.  There won't be much time to play."
+
+She sat before the mirror in her small dressing-room that night,
+ostensibly preparing for bed but actually taking stock of her
+situation.  She had done all she could, had been faithful and loyal,
+had made his home attractive, had catered to his tastes and tried
+to like his friends, had met his needs and responded to them.  And
+now, this.  She was bewildered and frightened.  How did women hold
+their husbands?
+
+She found him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the
+bedroom.  Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by
+doubts or introspection.  It was done.
+
+He was lying on his back, with his mouth open.  She felt a sudden
+and violent repugnance to getting into the bed beside him.  Sometime
+in the night he would turn over and throwing his arm about her, hold
+her close in his sleep; and it would be purely automatic, the
+mechanical result of habit.
+
+She lay on the edge of the bed and thought things over.
+
+He had his good qualities.  He was kind and affectionate to her
+family.  He had been wonderful when Jim died, and he loved Elizabeth
+dearly.  He was generous and open-handed.  He was handsome, too, in
+a big, heavy way.
+
+She began to find excuses for him.  Men were always a child-like
+prey to some women.  They were vain, and especially they were
+sex-vain; good looking men were a target for every sort of advance.
+She transferred her loathing of him to the woman she suspected of
+luring him away from her, and lay for hours hating her.
+
+She saw Leslie off in the morning with a perfunctory good-bye while
+cold anger and suspicion seethed in her.  And later she put on her
+hat and went home to lay the situation before her mother.  Mrs.
+Wheeler was out, however, and she found only Elizabeth sewing by
+her window.
+
+Nina threw her hat on the bed and sat down dispiritedly.
+
+"I suppose there's no news?" she asked.
+
+Nina watched her.  She was out of patience with Elizabeth,
+exasperated with the world.
+
+"Are you going to go on like this all your life?" she demanded.
+"Sitting by a window, waiting?  For a man who ran away from you?"
+
+"That's not true, and you know it."
+
+"They're all alike," Nina declared recklessly.  "They go along well
+enough, and they are all for virtue and for the home and fireside
+stuff, until some woman comes their way.  I ought to know."
+
+Elizabeth looked up quickly.
+
+"Why, Nina!" she said.  "You don't mean--"
+
+"He went to New York this morning.  He pretended to be going on
+business, but he's actually gone to see that actress.  He's been
+mad about her for months."
+
+"I don't believe it."
+
+"Oh, wake up," Nina said impatiently.  "The world isn't made up of
+good, kind, virtuous people.  It's rotten.  And men are all alike.
+Dick Livingstone and Les and all the rest--tarred with the same
+stick.  As long as there are women like this Carlysle creature
+they'll fall for them.  And you and I can sit at home and chew our
+nails and plan to keep them by us.  And we can't do it."
+
+In spite of herself a little question of doubt crept that day into
+Elizabeth's mind.  She had always known that they had not told her
+all the truth; that the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick
+extended even to her.  But she had never thought that it might
+include a woman.  Once there, the very humility of her love for Dick
+was an element in favor of the idea.  She had never been good enough,
+or wise or clever enough, for him.  She was too small and unimportant
+to be really vital.
+
+Dismissing the thought did no good.  It came back.  But because she
+was a healthy-minded and practical person she took the one course
+she could think of, and put the question that night to her father,
+when he came back from seeing David.
+
+David had sent for him early in the evening.  All day he had thought
+over the situation between Dick and Elizabeth, with growing pain and
+uneasiness.  He had not spoken of it to Lucy, or to Harrison Miller;
+he knew that they would not understand, and that Lucy would suffer.
+She was bewildered enough by Dick's departure.
+
+At noon he had insisted on getting up and being helped into his
+trousers.  So clad he felt more of a man and better able to cope
+with things, although his satisfaction in them was somewhat modified
+by the knowledge of two safety-pins at the sides, to take up their
+superfluous girth at the waistband.
+
+But even the sense of being clothed as a man again did not make it
+easier to say to Walter Wheeler what must be said.
+
+Walter took the news of Dick's return with a visible brightening.
+It was as though, out of the wreckage of his middle years, he saw
+that there was now some salvage, but he was grave and inarticulate
+over it, wrung David's hand and only said:
+
+"Thank God for it, David." And after a pause: "Was he all right?
+He remembered everything?"
+
+But something strange in the situation began to obtrude itself into
+his mind.  Dick had come back twenty-four hours ago.  Last night.
+And all this time--
+
+"Where is he now?"
+
+"He's not here, Walter."
+
+"He has gone away again, without seeing Elizabeth?"
+
+David cleared his throat.
+
+"He is still a fugitive.  He doesn't himself know he isn't guilty.
+I think he feels that he ought not to see her until--"
+
+"Come, come," Walter Wheeler said impatiently.  "Don't try to find
+excuses for him.  Let's have the truth, David.  I guess I can
+stand it."
+
+Poor David, divided between his love for Dick and his native honesty,
+threw out his hands.
+
+"I don't understand it, Wheeler," he said.  "You and I wouldn't, I
+suppose.  We are not the sort to lose the world for a woman.  The
+plain truth is that there is not a trace of Judson Clark in him
+to-day, save one.  That's the woman."
+
+When Wheeler said nothing, but sat twisting his hat in his hands,
+David went on.  It might be only a phase.  As its impression on
+Dick's youth had been deeper than others, so its effect was more
+lasting.  It might gradually disappear.  He was confident, indeed,
+that it would.  He had been reading on the subject all day.
+
+Walter Wheeler hardly heard him.  He was facing the incredible fact,
+and struggling with his own problem.  After a time he got up, shook
+hands with David and went home, the dog at his heels.
+
+During the evening that followed he made his resolution, not to tell
+her, never to let her suspect the truth.  But he began to wonder if
+she had heard something, for he found her eyes on him more than once,
+and when Margaret had gone up to bed she came over and sat on the
+arm of his chair.  She said an odd thing then, and one that made it
+impossible to lie to her later.
+
+"I come to you, a good bit as I would go to God, if he were a
+person," she said.  "I have got to know something, and you can tell
+me."
+
+He put his arm around her and held her close.
+
+"Go ahead, honey."
+
+"Daddy, do you realize that I am a woman now?"
+
+"I try to.  But it seems about six months since I was feeding you
+hot water for colic."
+
+She sat still for a moment, stroking his hair and being very careful
+not to spoil his neat parting.
+
+"You have never told me all about Dick, daddy.  You have always
+kept something back.  That's true, isn't it?"
+
+"There were details," he said uncomfortably.  "It wasn't necessary--"
+
+"Here's what I want to know.  If he has gone back to the time--you
+know, wouldn't he go back to caring for the people he loved then?"
+Then, suddenly, her childish appeal ceased, and she slid from the
+chair and stood before him.  "I must know, father.  I can bear it.
+The thing you have been keeping from me was another woman, wasn't it?"
+
+"It was so long ago," he temporized.  "Think of it, Elizabeth.  A
+boy of twenty-one or so."
+
+"Then there was?"
+
+"I believe so, at one time.  But I know positively that he hadn't
+seen or heard from her in ten years."
+
+"What sort of woman?"
+
+"I wouldn't think about it, honey.  It's all so long ago."
+
+"Did she live in Wyoming?"
+
+"She was an actress," he said, hard driven by her persistence.
+
+"Do you know her name?"
+
+"Only her stage name, honey."
+
+"But you know she was an actress!"
+
+He sighed.
+
+"All right, dear," he said.  "I'll tell you all I know.  She was
+an actress, and she married another man.  That's all there is to it.
+She's not young now.  She must be thirty now--if she's living," he
+added, as an afterthought.
+
+It was some time before she spoke again.
+
+"I suppose she was beautiful," she said slowly.
+
+"I don't know.  Most of them aren't, off the stage.  Anyhow, what
+does it matter now?"
+
+"Only that I know he has gone back to her.  And you know it too."
+
+He heard her going quietly out of the room.
+
+Long after, he closed the house and went cautiously upstairs.  She
+was waiting for him in the doorway of her room, in her nightgown.
+
+"I know it all now," she said steadily.  "It was because of her he
+shot the other man, wasn't it?"
+
+She saw her answer in his startled face, and closed her door quickly.
+He stood outside, and then he tapped lightly.
+
+"Let me in, honey," he said.  "I want to finish it.  You've got a
+wrong idea about it."
+
+When she did not answer he tried the door, but it was locked.  He
+turned and went downstairs again...
+
+When he came home the next afternoon Margaret met him in the hall.
+
+"She knows it, Walter."
+
+"Knows what?"
+
+"Knows he was back here and didn't see her.  Annie blurted it out;
+she'd got it from the Oglethorpe's laundress.  Mr. Oglethorpe saw
+him on the street."
+
+It took him some time to drag a coherent story from her.  Annie had
+told Elizabeth in her room, and then had told Margaret.  She had
+gone to Elizabeth at once, to see what she could do, but Elizabeth
+had been in her closet, digging among her clothes.  She had got out
+her best frock and put it on, while her mother sat on the bed not
+even daring to broach the matter in her mind, and had gone out.
+There was a sort of cold determination in her that frightened
+Margaret.  She had laughed a good bit, for one thing.
+
+"She's terribly proud," she finished.  "She'll do something reckless,
+I'm sure.  It wouldn't surprise me to see her come back engaged to
+Wallie Sayre.  I think that's where she went."
+
+But apparently she had not, or if she had she said nothing about it.
+From that time on they saw a change in her; she was as loving as
+ever, but she affected a sort of painful brightness that was a
+little hard.  As though she had clad herself in armor against
+further suffering.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+For months Beverly Carlysle had remained a remote and
+semi-mysterious figure.  She had been in some hearts and in many
+minds, but to most of them she was a name only.  She had been the
+motive behind events she never heard of, the quiet center in a
+tornado of emotions that circled about without touching her.
+
+On the whole she found her life, with the settling down of the
+piece to a successful, run, one of prosperous monotony.  She had
+re-opened and was living in the 56th Street house, keeping a simple
+establishment of cook, butler and maid, and in the early fall she
+added a town car and a driver.  After that she drove out every
+afternoon except on matinee days, almost always alone, but sometimes
+with a young girl from the company.
+
+She was very lonely.  The kaleidoscope that is theatrical New York
+had altered since she left it.  Only one or two of her former
+friends remained, and she found them uninteresting and narrow with
+the narrowness of their own absorbing world.  She had forgotten that
+the theater was like an island, cut off from the rest of the world,
+having its own politics, its own society divided by caste, almost
+its own religion.  Out of its insularity it made occasional
+excursions to dinners and week-ends; even into marriage, now and
+then with an outlander.  But almost always it went back, eager for
+its home of dressing-room and footlights, of stage entrances up
+dirty alleys, of door-keepers and managers and parts and costumes.
+
+Occasionally she had callers, men she had met or who were brought to
+see her.  She saw them over a tea-table, judged them remorselessly,
+and eliminated gradually all but one or two.  She watched her dignity
+and her reputation with the care of an ambitious woman trying to live
+down the past, and she succeeded measurably well.  Now and then a
+critic spoke of her as a second Maude Adams, and those notices she
+kept and treasured.
+
+But she was always uneasy.  Never since the night he had seen Judson
+Clark in the theater had they rung up without her brother having
+carefully combed the house with his eyes.  She knew her limitations;
+they would have to ring down if she ever saw him over the footlights.
+And the season had brought its incidents, to connect her with the
+past.  One night Gregory had come back and told her Jean Melis was
+in the balcony.
+
+The valet was older and heavier, but he had recognized him.
+
+"Did he see you?" was her first question.
+
+"Yes.  What about it?  He never saw me but once, and that was
+at night and out of doors."
+
+"Sometimes I think I can't stand it, Fred.  The eternal suspense,
+the waiting for something to happen."
+
+"If anything was going to happen it would have happened months ago.
+Bassett has given it up.  And Jud's dead.  Even Wilkins knows that."
+
+She turned on him angrily.
+
+"You haven't a heart, have you?  You're glad he's dead."
+
+"Not at all.  As long as he kept under cover he was all right. But
+if he is, I don't see why you should fool yourself into thinking
+you're sorry.  It's the best solution to a number of things."
+
+"What do you suppose brought Jean Melis here?"
+
+"What?  To see the best play in New York.  Besides, why not allow
+the man a healthy curiosity?  He was pretty closely connected with
+a hectic part of your life, my dear.  Now buck up, and for the
+Lord's sake forget the Frenchman.  He's got nothing."
+
+"He saw me that night, on the stairs.  He never took his eyes off
+me at the inquest."
+
+She gave, however, an excellent performance that night, and nothing
+more was heard of the valet.
+
+There were other alarms, all of them without foundation.  She went
+on her way, rejected an offer or two of marriage, spent her mornings
+in bed and her afternoons driving or in the hands of her hair-dresser
+and manicure, cared for the flowers that came in long casket-like
+boxes, and began to feel a sense of security again.  She did not
+intend to marry, or to become interested in any one man.
+
+She had hardly given a thought to Leslie Ward.  He had come and
+gone, one of that steady procession of men, mostly married, who
+battered their heads now and then like night beetles outside a
+window, against the hard glass of her ambition.  Because her
+business was to charm, she had been charming to him.  And could not
+always remember his name!
+
+As the months went by she began to accept Fred's verdict that
+nothing was going to happen.  Bassett was back and at work.  Either
+dead or a fugitive somewhere was Judson Clark, but that thought she
+had to keep out of her mind.  Sometimes, as the play went on, and
+she was able to make her solid investments out of it, she wondered
+if her ten years of retirement had been all the price she was to
+pay for his ruin; but she put that thought away too, although she
+never minimized her responsibility when she faced it.
+
+But her price had been heavy at that.  She was childless and alone,
+lavishing her aborted maternity on a brother who was living his
+prosperous, cheerful and not too moral life at her expense.  Fred
+was, she knew, slightly drunk with success; he attended to his
+minimum of labor with the least possible effort, had an expensive
+apartment on the Drive, and neglected her except, when he needed
+money.  She began to see, as other women had seen before her, that
+her success had, by taking away the necessity for initiative, been
+extremely bad for him.
+
+That was the situation when, one night late in October, the trap of
+Bassett's devising began to close in.  It had been raining, but in
+spite of that they had sold standing room to the fire limit.  Having
+got the treasurer's report on the night's business and sent it to
+Beverly's dressing-room, Gregory wandered into his small, low-ceiled
+office under the balcony staircase, and closing the door sat down.
+It was the interval after the second act, and above the hum of
+voices outside the sound of the orchestra penetrated faintly.
+
+He was entirely serene.  He had a supper engagement after the show,
+he had a neat car waiting outside to take him to it, and the night's
+business had been extraordinary.  He consulted his watch and then
+picked up an evening paper.  A few moments later he found himself
+reading over and over a small notice inserted among the personals.
+
+"Personal: Jean Melis, who was in Norada, Wyoming, during the
+early fall of 1911 please communicate with L 22, this office."
+
+The orchestra was still playing outside; the silly, giggling crowds
+were moving back to their seats, and somewhere Jean Melis, or the
+friends of Jean Melis, who would tell him of it, were reading that
+message.
+
+He got his hat and went out, forgetful of the neat car at the curb,
+of the supper engagement, of the night's business, and wandered
+down the street through the rain.  But his first uneasiness passed
+quickly.  He saw Bassett in the affair, and probably Clark himself,
+still living and tardily determined to clear his name.  But if the
+worst came to the worst, what could they do? They could go only so
+far, and then they would have to quit.
+
+It would be better, however, if they did not see Melis.  Much
+better; there was no use involving a simple situation.  And Bev
+could be kept out of it altogether, until it was over.  Ashamed of
+his panic he went back to the theater, got a railway schedule and
+looked up trains.  He should have done it long before, he recognized,
+have gone to Bassett in the spring.  But how could he have known
+then that Bassett was going to make a life-work of the case?
+
+He had only one uncertainty.  Suppose that Bassett had learned about
+Clifton Hines?
+
+By the time the curtain rang down on the last act he was his dapper,
+debonair self again, made his supper engagement, danced half the
+night, and even dozed a little on the way home.  But he slept badly
+and was up early, struggling with the necessity for keeping Jean
+Melis out of the way.
+
+He wondered through what formalities L 22, for instance, would have
+to go in order to secure a letter addressed to him?  Whether he had
+to present a card or whether he walked in demanded his mail and went
+away.  That thought brought another with it.  Wasn't it probable
+that Bassett was in New York, and would call for his mail himself?
+
+He determined finally to take the chance, claim to be L 22, and if
+Melis had seen the advertisement and replied, get the letter.  It
+would be easy to square it with the valet, by saying that he had
+recognized him in the theater and that Miss Carlysle wished to send
+him a box.
+
+He had small hope of a letter at his first call, unless the Frenchman
+had himself seen the notice, but his anxiety drove him early to the
+office.  There was nothing there, but he learned one thing.  He had
+to go through with no formalities.  The clerk merely looked in a box,
+said "Nothing here," and went on about his business.  At eleven
+o'clock he went back again, and after a careful scrutiny of the
+crowd presented himself once more.
+
+"L 22? Here you are."
+
+He had the letter in his hand.  He had glanced at it and had thrust
+it deep in his pocket, when he felt a hand on his shoulder.  He
+wheeled and faced Bassett.
+
+"I thought I recognized that back," said the reporter, cheerfully.
+"Come over here, old man.  I want to talk to you."
+
+But he held to Gregory's shoulder.  In a corner Bassett dropped the
+friendliness he had assumed for the clerk's benefit, and faced him
+with cold anger.
+
+"I'll have that letter now, Gregory," he said.  "And I've got a
+damned good notion to lodge an information against you."
+
+"I don't know what you're talking about."
+
+"Forget it.  I was behind you when you asked for that letter.  Give
+it here.  I want to show you something."
+
+Suddenly, with the letter in his hand, Bassett laughed and then tore
+it open.  There was only a sheet of blank paper inside.
+
+"I wasn't sure you'd see it, and I didn't think you'd fall for it
+if you did," he observed.  "But I was pretty sure you didn't want
+me to see Melis.  Now I know it."
+
+"Well, I didn't," Gregory said sullenly.
+
+"Just the same, I expect to see him.  The day's early yet, and
+that's not a common name.  But I'll take darned good care you don't
+get any more letters from here."
+
+"What do you think Melis can tell you, that you don't know?"
+
+"I'll explain that to you some day," Bassett said cheerfully.  "Some
+day when you are in a more receptive mood than you are now.  The
+point at this moment seems to me to be, what does Melis know that
+you don't want me to know?  I suppose you don't intend to tell me."
+
+"Not here.  You may believe it or not, Bassett, but I was going to
+your town to-night to see you."
+
+"Well," Bassett said sceptically, "I've got your word for it.  And
+I've got nothing to do all day but to listen to you."
+
+To his proposition that they go to his hotel Gregory assented
+sullenly, and they moved out to find a taxicab.  On the pavement,
+however, he held back.
+
+"I've got a right to know something," he said, "considering what
+he's done to me and mine.  Clark's alive, I suppose?"
+
+"He's alive all right."
+
+"Then I'll trade you, Bassett.  I'll come over with what I know, if
+you'll tell me one thing.  What sent him into hiding for ten years,
+and makes him turn up now, yelling for help?"
+
+Bassett reflected.  The offer of a statement from Gregory was
+valuable, but, on the other hand, he was anxious not to influence
+his narrative.  And Gregory saw his uncertainty.  He planted
+himself firmly on the pavement.
+
+"How about it?" he demanded.
+
+"I'll tell you this much, Gregory.  He never meant to bring the
+thing up again.  In a way, it's me you're up against.  Not Clark.
+And you can be pretty sure I know what I'm doing.  I've got Clark,
+and I've got the report of the coroner's inquest, and I'll get
+Melis.  I'm going to get to the bottom of this if I have to dig a
+hole that buries me."
+
+In a taxicab Gregory sat tense and erect, gnawing at his blond
+mustache.  After a time he said:
+
+"What are you after, in all this?  The story, I suppose.  And the
+money.  I daresay you're not doing it for love."
+
+Bassett surveyed him appraisingly.
+
+"You wouldn't understand my motives if I told you.  As a matter of
+fact, he doesn't want the money."
+
+Gregory sneered.
+
+"Don't kid yourself," he said.  "However, as a matter of fact I
+don't think he'll take it.  It might cost too much.  Where is he?
+Shooting pills again?"
+
+"You'll see him in about five minutes."
+
+If the news was a surprise Gregory gave no evidence of it, except
+to comment:
+
+"You're a capable person, aren't you?  I'll bet you could tune a
+piano if you were put to it."
+
+He carried the situation well, the reporter had to admit; the only
+evidence he gave of strain was that the hands with which he lighted
+a cigarette were unsteady.  He surveyed the obscure hotel at which
+the cab stopped with a sneering smile, and settled his collar as he
+looked it over.
+
+"Not advertising to the world that you're in town, I see."
+
+"We'll do that, just as soon as we're ready.  Don't worry."
+
+The laugh he gave at that struck unpleasantly on Bassett's ears.
+But inside the building he lost some of his jauntiness.  "Queer
+place to find Judson Clark," he said once.
+
+And again:
+
+"You'd better watch him when I go in.  He may bite me."
+
+To which Bassett grimly returned: "He's probably rather particular
+what he bites."
+
+He was uneasily conscious that Gregory, while nervous and tense,
+was carrying the situation with a certain assurance.  If he was
+acting it was very good acting.  And that opinion was strengthened
+when he threw open the door and Gregory advanced into the room.
+
+"Well, Clark," he said, coolly.  "I guess you didn't expect to see
+me, did you?"
+
+He made no offer to shake hands as Dick turned from the window, nor
+did Dick make any overtures.  But there was no enmity at first in
+either face; Gregory was easy and assured, Dick grave, and, Bassett
+thought, slightly impatient.  From that night in his apartment the
+reporter had realized that he was constantly fighting a sort of
+passive resistance in Dick, a determination not at any cost to
+involve Beverly.  Behind that, too, he felt that still another
+battle was going on, one at which he could only guess, but which
+made Dick somber at times and grimly quiet always.
+
+"I meant to look you up," was his reply to Gregory's nonchalant
+greeting.
+
+"Well, your friend here did that for you," Gregory said, and smiled
+across at Bassett.  "He has his own methods, and I'll say they're
+effectual."
+
+He took off his overcoat and flung it on the bed, and threw a swift,
+appraising glance at Dick.  It was on Dick that he was banking, not
+on Bassett.  He hated and feared Bassett.  He hated Dick, but he was
+not afraid of him.  He lighted a cigarette and faced Dick with a
+malicious smile.
+
+"So here we are, again, Jud!" he said.  "But with this change, that
+now it's you who are the respectable member of the community, and
+I'm the--well, we'll call it the butterfly."
+
+There was unmistakable insult in his tone, and Dick caught it.
+
+"Then I take it you're still living off your sister?"
+
+The contempt in Dick's voice whipped the color to Gregory's face
+and clenched his fist.  But he relaxed in a moment and laughed.
+
+"Don't worry, Bassett," he said, his eyes on Dick.  "We haven't any
+reason to like each other, but he's bigger than I am.  I won't hit
+him." Then he hardened his voice.  "But I'll remind you, Clark, that
+personally I don't give a God-damn whether you swing or not.  Also
+that I can keep my mouth shut, walk out of here, and have you in
+quod in the next hour, if I decide to."
+
+"But you won't," Bassett said smoothly.  "You won't, any more than
+you did it last spring, when you sent that little letter of yours
+to David Livingstone."
+
+"No.  You're right.  I won't.  But if I tell you what I came here
+to say, Bassett, get this straight.  It's not because I'm afraid of
+you, or of him.  Donaldson's dead.  What value would Melis's
+testimony have after ten years, if you put him on the stand?  It's
+not that.  It's because you'll put your blundering foot into it and
+ruin Bev's career, unless I tell you the truth."
+
+It was to Bassett then that he told his story, he and Bassett
+sitting, Dick standing with his elbow on the mantelpiece, tall and
+weary and almost detached.
+
+"I've got to make my own position plain in this," he said.  "I
+didn't like Clark, and I kept her from marrying him.  There was one
+time, before she met Lucas, when she almost did it.  I was away
+when she decided on that fool trip to the Clark ranch.  We couldn't
+get a New York theater until November, and she had some time, so
+they went.  I've got her story of what happened there.  You can
+check it up with what you know."
+
+He turned to Dick for a moment.
+
+"You were drinking pretty hard that night, but you may remember
+this: She had quarreled with Lucas at dinner that night and with
+you.  That's true, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"She went to her room and began to pack her things.  Then she
+thought it over, and she decided to try to persuade Lucas to go
+too.  Things had begun all right, but they were getting strained
+and unpleasant.  She went down the stairs, and Melis saw her, the
+valet.  The living-room was dark, but there was a light coming
+through the billiard room door, and against it she saw the figure
+of a man in the doorway.  He had his back to her, and he had a
+revolver in his hand.  She ran across the room when he heard her
+and when he turned she saw it was Lucas.  Do you remember, Jud,
+having a revolver and Lucas taking it from you?"
+
+"No.  Donaldson testified I'd had a revolver."
+
+"Well, that's how we figure he'd got the gun.  She thought at once
+that Lucas and you had quarreled, and that he was going to shoot.
+She tried to take it from him, but he was drunk and stubborn.  It
+went off and killed him."
+
+Bassett leaned forward.
+
+"That's straight, is it?"
+
+"I'm telling you."
+
+"Then why in God's name didn't she say that at the inquest?"
+
+"She was afraid it wouldn't be believed.  Look at the facts.  She'd
+quarreled with Lucas.  There had been a notorious situation with
+regard to Clark.  And remember this.  She had done it.  I know her
+well enough, however, to say that she would have confessed,
+eventually, but Clark had beaten it.  It was reasonably sure that
+he was lost in the blizzard.  You've got to allow for that."
+
+Bassett said nothing.  After a silence Dick spoke:
+
+"What about the revolver?"
+
+"She had it in her hand.  She dropped it and stood still, too
+stunned to scream.  Lucas, she says, took a step or two forward,
+and fell through the doorway.  Donaldson came running in, and
+you know the rest."
+
+Bassett was the first to break the silence.
+
+"She will be willing to testify to that now, of course?"
+
+"And stand trial?"
+
+"Not necessarily.  Clark would be on trial.  He's been indicted.
+He has to be tried."
+
+"Why does he have to be tried?  He's free now.  He's been free for
+ten years.  And I tell you as an honest opinion that the thing
+would kill her.  Accident and all, she did it.  And there would be
+some who'd never believe she hadn't tired of Lucas, and wanted the
+Clark money."
+
+"That's a chance she'll have to take," Bassett said doggedly.  "The
+only living witness who could be called would be the valet.  And
+remember this: for ten years he has believed that she did it.  He'll
+have built up a story by this time, perhaps unconsciously, that
+might damn her."
+
+Dick moved.
+
+"There's only one thing to do.  You're right, Gregory.  I'll
+never expose her to that."
+
+"You're crazy," Bassett said angrily.
+
+"Not at all.  I told you I wouldn't hide behind a woman.  As a
+matter of fact, I've learned what I wanted.  Lucas wasn't murdered.
+I didn't shoot him.  That's what really matters.  I'm no worse off
+than I was before; considerably better, in fact.  And I don't see
+what's to be gained by going any further."
+
+In spite of his protests, Bassett was compelled finally to agree.
+He was sulky and dispirited.  He saw the profound anticlimax to all
+his effort of Dick wandering out again, legally dead and legally
+guilty, and he swore roundly under his breath.
+
+"All right," he grunted at last.  "I guess that's the last word,
+Gregory.  But you tell her from me that if she doesn't reopen the
+matter of her own accord, she'll have a man's life on her
+conscience."
+
+"I'll not tell her anything about it.  I'm not only her brother;
+I'm her manager now.  And I'm not kicking any hole in the boat that
+floats me."
+
+He was self-confident and slightly insolent; the hands with which
+he lighted a fresh cigarette no longer trembled, and the glance
+he threw at Dick was triumphant and hostile.
+
+"As a man sows, Clark!" he said.  "You sowed hell for a number of
+people once."
+
+Bassett had to restrain an impulse to kick him out of the door.
+When he had gone Bassett turned to Dick with assumed lightness.
+
+"Well," he said, "here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go!"
+
+He wandered around the room, restless and disappointed.  He knew,
+and Dick knew, that they had come to the end of the road, and that
+nothing lay beyond.  In his own unpleasant way Fred Gregory had
+made a case for his sister that tied their hands, and the crux of
+the matter had lain in his final gibe: "As a man sows, Clark, so
+shall he reap." The moral issue was there.
+
+
+"I suppose the Hines story goes by the board, eh?" he commented
+after a pause.
+
+"Yes.  Except that I wish I'd known about him when I could have
+done something.  He's my half-brother, any way you look at it,
+and he had a rotten deal.  Sometimes a man sows," he added, with
+a wry smile, "and the other fellow reaps."
+
+Bassett went out after that, going to the office on the chance of
+a letter from Melis, but there was none.  When he came back he
+found Dick standing over a partially packed suitcase, and knew that
+they had come to the end of the road indeed.
+
+"What's the next step?" he asked bluntly.
+
+"I'll have to leave here.  It's too expensive."
+
+"And after that, what?"
+
+"I'll get a job.  I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere.
+I can grow a beard-that's the usual thing, isn't it?"
+
+Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor.
+"It's incredible," he said.  "It's monstrous.  It's a joke.  Here
+you are, without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet's
+coffin between heaven and earth.  It makes me sick."
+
+He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22
+forwarded, but without much hope.  His last clutch of Dick's hand
+had a sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him
+most of the way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that
+saw him off with a smile.
+
+By the next afternoon's mail he received a note from New York, with
+a few words of comment penciled on it in Dick's writing.  "This
+came this evening.  I sent back the money.  D."  The note was from
+Gregory and had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill.  It
+began without superscription:  "Enclosed find a hundred dollars,
+as I imagine funds may be short.  If I were you I'd get out of here.
+There has been considerable excitement, and you know too many people
+in this burg."
+
+Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.
+
+"Now why the devil did he do that?" he reflected.  He sat for some
+time, thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion.
+The story Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely
+calculated to shut off all further inquiry.  They had had ten years;
+ten years to plan, eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare
+their defense, in case Clark turned up.  Wasn't that why Gregory
+had been so assured?  But he had not been content to let well enough
+alone; he had perhaps overreached himself.
+
+Then what was the answer?  She had killed Lucas, but was it an
+accident?  And there must have been a witness, or they would have
+had nothing to fear.  He wrote out on a bit of paper three names,
+and sat looking at them:
+
+Hattie Thorwald
+Jean Melis
+Clifton Hines.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart.  On the
+evening of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen
+her, she deliberately killed her love and decently interred it.
+She burned her notes and his one letter and put away her ring,
+performing the rites not as rites but as a shameful business to be
+done with quickly.  She tore his photograph into bits and threw them
+into her waste basket, and having thus housecleaned her room set to
+work to houseclean her heart.
+
+She found very little to do.  She was numb and totally without
+feeling.  The little painful constriction in her chest which had so
+often come lately with her thoughts of him was gone.  She felt
+extraordinarily empty, but not light, and her feet dragged about
+the room.
+
+She felt no sense of Dick's unworthiness, but simply that she was
+up against something she could not fight, and no longer wanted to
+fight.  She was beaten, but the strange thing was that she did not
+care.  Only, she would not be pitied.  As the days went on she
+resented the pity that had kept her in ignorance for so long, and
+had let her wear her heart on her sleeve; and she even wondered
+sometimes whether the story of Dick's loss of memory had not been
+false, evolved out of that pity and the desire to save her pain.
+
+David sent for her, but she wrote him a little note, formal and
+restrained.  She would come in a day or two, but now she must get
+her bearings.  He was, to know that she was not angry, and felt it
+all for the best, and she was very lovingly his, Elizabeth.
+
+She knew now that she would eventually marry Wallie Sayre if only
+to get away from pity.  He would have to know the truth about her,
+that she did not love any one; not even her father and her mother.
+She pretended to care for fear of hurting them, but she was actually
+frozen quite hard.  She did not believe in love.  It was a terrible
+thing, to be avoided by any one who wanted to get along, and this
+avoiding was really quite simple.  One simply stopped feeling.
+
+On the Sunday after she had come to this comfortable knowledge she
+sat in the church as usual, in the choir stalls, and suddenly she
+hated the church.  She hated the way the larynx of Henry Wallace,
+the tenor, stuck out like a crabapple over his low collar.  She
+hated the fat double chin of the bass.  She hated the talk about
+love and the certain rewards of virtue, and the faces of the
+congregation, smug and sure of salvation.
+
+She went to the choir master after the service to hand in her
+resignation.  And did not, because it had occurred to her that it
+might look, to use Nina's word, as though she were crushed.
+Crushed! That was funny.
+
+Wallie Sayre was waiting for her outside, and she went up with him
+to lunch, and afterwards they played golf.  They had rather an
+amusing game, and once she had to sit down on a bunker and laugh
+until she was weak, while he fought his way out of a pit.  Crushed,
+indeed!
+
+So the weaving went on, almost completed now.  With Wallie Sayre
+biding his time, but fairly sure of the result.  With Jean Melis
+happening on a two-days' old paper, and reading over and over a
+notice addressed to him.  With Leslie Ward, neither better nor
+worse than his kind, seeking adventure in a bypath, which was East
+56th Street.  And with Dick wandering the streets of New York after
+twilight, and standing once with his coat collar turned up against
+the rain outside of the Metropolitan Club, where the great painting
+of his father hung over a mantelpiece.
+
+Now that he was near Beverly, Dick hesitated to see her.  He felt
+no resentment at her long silence, nor at his exile which had
+resulted from it.  He made excuses for her, recognized his own
+contribution to the catastrophe, knew, too, that nothing was to be
+gained by seeing her again.  But he determined finally to see her
+once more, and then to go away, leaving her to peace and to success.
+
+She would know now that she had nothing to fear from him.  All he
+wanted was to satisfy the hunger that was in him by seeing her, and
+then to go away.
+
+Curiously, that hunger to see her had been in abeyance while Bassett
+was with him.  It was only when he was alone again that it came up;
+and although he knew that, he was unconscious of another fact, that
+every word, every picture of her on the great boardings which walled
+in every empty lot, everything, indeed, which brought her into the
+reality of the present, loosened by so much her hold on him out of
+the past.
+
+When he finally went to the 56th Street house it was on impulse.
+He had meant to pass it, but he found himself stopping, and half
+angrily made his determination.  He would follow the cursed thing
+through now and get it over.  Perhaps he had discounted it too much
+in advance, waited too long, hoped too much.  Perhaps it was simply
+that that last phase was already passing.  But he felt no thrill,
+no expectancy, as he rang the bell and was admitted to the familiar
+hall.
+
+It was peopled with ghosts, for him.  Upstairs, in the drawing-room
+that extended across the front of the house, she had told him of
+her engagement to Howard Lucas.  Later on, coming back from Europe,
+he had gone back there to find Lucas installed in the house, his
+cigars on the table, his photographs on the piano, his books
+scattered about.  And Lucas himself, smiling, handsome and
+triumphant on the hearth rug, dressed for dinner except for a
+brocaded dressing-gown, putting his hand familiarly on Beverly's
+shoulder, and calling her "old girl."
+
+He wandered into the small room to the right of the hall, where in
+other days he had waited to be taken upstairs, and stood looking
+out of the window.  He heard some one, a caller, come down, get
+into his overcoat in the hall and go out, but he was not interested.
+He did not know that Leslie Ward had stood outside the door for a
+minute, had seen and recognized him, and had then slammed out.
+
+He was quite steady as the butler preceded him up the stairs.  He
+even noticed certain changes in the house, the door at the landing
+converted into an arch, leaded glass in the dining-room windows
+beyond it.  But he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and
+saw himself a shabby contrast to the former days.
+
+He faced her, still with that unexpected composure, and he saw her
+very little changed.  Even the movement with which she came toward
+him with both hands out was familiar.
+
+"Jud!" she said.  "Oh, my dear!"
+
+He saw that she was profoundly moved, and suddenly he was sorry for
+her.  Sorry for the years behind them both, for the burden she had
+carried, for the tears in her eyes.
+
+"Dear old Bev!" he said.
+
+She put her head against his shoulder, and cried unrestrainedly;
+and he held her there, saying small, gentle, soothing things,
+smoothing her hair.  But all the time he knew that life had been
+playing him another trick; he felt a great tenderness for her and
+profound pity, but he did not love her, or want her.  He saw that
+after all the suffering and waiting, the death and exile, he was
+left at the end with nothing.  Nothing at all.
+
+When she was restored to a sort of tense composure he found to his
+discomfort that woman-like she intended to abase herself thoroughly
+and completely.  She implored his forgiveness for his long exile,
+gazing at him humbly, and when he said in a matter-of-fact tone
+that he had been happy, giving him a look which showed that she
+thought he was lying to save her unhappiness.
+
+"You are trying to make it easier for me.  But I know, Jud."
+
+"I'm telling you the truth," he said, patiently.  "There's one
+point I didn't think necessary to tell your brother.  For a good
+while I didn't remember anything about it.  If it hadn't been for
+that-well, I don't know.  Anyhow, don't look at me as though I
+willfully saved you.  I didn't."
+
+She sat still, pondering that, and twisting a ring on her finger.
+
+"What do you mean to do?" she asked, after a pause.
+
+"I don't know.  I'll find something."
+
+"You won't go back to your work?"
+
+"I don't see how I can.  I'm in hiding, in a sort of casual fashion."
+
+To his intense discomfiture she began to cry again.  She couldn't
+go through with it.  She would go back to Norada and tell the whole
+thing.  She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't
+do it.  But for the first time he felt that in this one thing she
+was not sincere.  Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but
+now he felt she was acting.
+
+"Suppose we don't go into that now," he said gently.  "You've had
+about all you can stand."  He got up awkwardly.  "I suppose you are
+playing to-night?"
+
+She nodded, looking up at him dumbly.
+
+"Better lie down, then, and--forget me."  He smiled down at her.
+
+"I've never forgotten you, Jud.  And now, seeing you again--I--"
+
+Her face worked.  She continued to look up at him, piteously.  The
+appalling truth came to him then, and that part of him which had
+remained detached and aloof, watching, almost smiled at the irony.
+She cared for him.  Out of her memories she had built up something
+to care for, something no more himself than she was the woman of
+his dreams; but with this difference, that she was clinging,
+woman-fashion, to the thing she had built, and he had watched it
+crumble before his eyes.
+
+"Will you promise to go and rest?"
+
+"Yes.  If you say so."
+
+She was acquiescent and humble.  Her eyes were soft, faithful,
+childlike.
+
+"I've suffered so, Jud."
+
+"I know."
+
+"You don't hate me, do you?"
+
+"Why should I?  Just remember this: while you were carrying this
+burden, I was happier than I'd ever been.  I'll tell you about it
+some time."
+
+She got up, and he perceived that she expected him again to take
+her in his arms.  He felt ridiculous and resentful, and rather as
+though he was expected to kiss the hand that had beaten him, but
+when she came close to him he put an arm around her shoulders.
+
+"Poor Bev!" he said.  "We've made pretty much a mess of it, haven't
+we?"
+
+He patted her and let her go, and her eyes followed him as he left
+the room.  The elder brotherliness of that embrace had told her the
+truth as he could never have hurt her in words.  She went back to
+the chair where he had sat, and leaned her cheek against it.
+
+After a time she went slowly upstairs and into her room.  When her
+maid came in she found her before the mirror of her dressing-table,
+staring at her reflection with hard, appraising eyes.
+
+Leslie's partner, wandering into the hotel at six o'clock, found
+from the disordered condition of the room that Leslie had been back,
+had apparently bathed, shaved and made a careful toilet, and gone
+out again.  Joe found himself unexpectedly at a loose end.  Filled,
+with suppressed indignation he commenced to dress, getting out a
+shirt, hunting his evening studs, and lining up what he meant to
+say to Leslie over his defection.
+
+Then, at a quarter to seven, Leslie came in, top-hatted and
+morning-coated, with a yellowing gardenia in his buttonhole and his
+shoes covered with dust.
+
+"Hello, Les," Joe said, glancing up from a laborious struggle with
+a stud.  "Been to a wedding?"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You look like it."
+
+"I made a call, and since then I've been walking."
+
+"Some walk, I'd say," Joe observed, looking at him shrewdly.
+"What's wrong, Les?  Fair one turn you down?"
+
+"Go to hell," Leslie said irritably.
+
+He flung off his coat and jerked at his tie.  Then, with it hanging
+loose, he turned to Joe.
+
+"I'm going to tell you something.  I know it's safe with you, and
+I need some advice.  I called on a woman this afternoon.  You know
+who she is.  Beverly Carlysle."
+
+Joe whistled softly.
+
+"That's not the point," Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice.
+"I'm not defending myself.  She's a friend; I've got a right to
+call there if I want to."
+
+"Sure you have," soothed Joe.
+
+"Well, you know the situation at home, and who Livingstone actually
+is.  The point is that, while that poor kid at home is sitting
+around killing herself with grief, Clark's gone back to her.  To
+Beverly Carlysle."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Know?  I saw him this afternoon, at her house."
+
+He sat still, moodily reviewing the situation.  His thoughts were
+a chaotic and unpleasant mixture of jealousy, fear of Nina, anxiety
+over Elizabeth, and the sense of a lost romantic adventure.  After
+a while he got up.
+
+"She's a nice kid," he said.  "I'm fond of her.  And I don't know
+what to do."
+
+Suddenly Joe grinned.
+
+"I see," he said.  "And you can't tell her, or the family, where
+you saw him!"
+
+"Not without raising the deuce of a row."
+
+He began, automatically, to dress for dinner.  Joe moved around
+the room, rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and
+produced a bottle of gin from his bag.  Leslie did not hear him, nor
+the later preparation of the cocktails.  He was reflecting bitterly
+on the fact that a man who married built himself a wall against
+romance, a wall, compounded of his own new sense of responsibility,
+of family ties, and fear.
+
+Joe brought him a cocktail.
+
+"Drink it, old dear," he said.  "And when it's down I'll tell you
+a few little things about playing around with ladies who have a
+past.  Here's to forgetting 'em."
+
+Leslie took the glass.
+
+"Right-o," he said.
+
+He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business
+in New York.  His going rather resembled a flight.  Tossing
+sleepless the night before, he had found what many a man had
+discovered before him, that his love of clandestine adventure was
+not as strong as his caution.  He had had a shock.  True, his affair
+with Beverly had been a formless thing, a matter of imagination and
+a desire to assure himself that romance, for him, was not yet dead.
+True, too, that he had nothing to fear from Dick Livingstone.  But
+the encounter had brought home to him the danger of this old-new
+game he was playing.  He was running like a frightened child.
+
+He thought of various plans.  One of them was to tell Nina the
+truth, take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr.
+Wheeler.  One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his
+humiliating admission.  But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas,
+was uncompromising in rectitude, and would understand as only a
+man could that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful,
+he had been actuated by at least subconscious desire.
+
+His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need
+have been, perhaps more self-conscious.  And he genuinely cared for
+Elizabeth.  It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that
+lay behind his ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion
+was both wilful and cruel.
+
+Yet, when the time came, he found it hard to tell her.  He took her
+for a drive one evening soon after his return, forcibly driving off
+Wallie Sayre to do so, and eying surreptitiously now and then her
+pale, rather set face.  He found a quiet lane and stopped the car
+there, and then turned and faced her.
+
+"How've you been, little sister, while I've been wandering the gay
+white way?" he asked.
+
+"I've been all right, Leslie."
+
+"Not quite all right, I think.  Have you ever thought, Elizabeth,
+that no man on earth is worth what you've been going through?"
+
+"I'm all right, I tell you," she said impatiently.  "I'm not
+grieving any more.  That's the truth, Les.  I know now that he
+doesn't intend to come back, and I don't care.  I never even think
+about him, now."
+
+"I see," he said.  "Well, that's that."
+
+But he had not counted on her intuition, and was startled to hear
+her say:
+
+"Well?  Go on."
+
+"What do you mean, go on?"
+
+"You brought me out here to tell me something."
+
+"Not at all.  I simply--"
+
+"Where is he?  You've seen him."
+
+He tried to meet her eyes, failed, cursed himself for a fool.  "He's
+alive and well, Elizabeth.  I saw him in New York."  It was a full
+minute before she spoke again, and then her lips were stiff and her
+voice strained.
+
+"Has he gone back to her?  To the actress he used to care for?"
+
+He hesitated, but he knew he would have to go on.
+
+"I'm going to tell you something, Elizabeth.  It's not very
+creditable to me, but I'll have to trust you.  I don't want to see
+you wasting your life.  You've got plenty of courage and a lot of
+spirit.  And you've got to forget him."
+
+He told her, and then he took her home.  He was a little frightened,
+for there was something not like her in the way she had taken it, a
+sort of immobility that might, he thought, cover heartbreak.  But
+she smiled when she thanked him, and went very calmly into the house.
+
+That night she accepted Wallie Sayre.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+Bassett was having a visitor.  He sat in his chair while that visitor
+ranged excitedly up and down the room, a short stout man, well dressed
+and with a mixture of servility and importance.  The valet's first
+words, as he stood inside the door, had been significant.
+
+"I should like to know, first, if I am talking to the police."
+
+"No--and yes," Bassett said genially.  "Come and sit down, man.
+What I mean is this.  I am a friend of Judson Clark's, and this may
+or may not be a police matter.  I don't know yet."
+
+"You are a friend of Mr. Clark's?  Then the report was correct.
+He is still alive, sir?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The valet got out a handkerchief and wiped his face.  He was
+clearly moved.
+
+"I am glad of that.  Very glad.  I saw some months ago, in a
+newspaper--where is he?"
+
+"In New York.  Now Melis, I've an idea that you know something about
+the crime Judson Clark was accused of.  You intimated that at the
+inquest."
+
+"Mrs. Lucas killed him."
+
+"So she says," Bassett said easily.
+
+The valet jumped and stared.
+
+"She admits it, as the result of an accident.  She also admits
+hiding the revolver where you found it."
+
+"Then you do not need me."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that."
+
+The valet was puzzled.
+
+"I want you to think back, Melis.  You saw her go down the stairs,
+sometime before the shot.  Later you were confident she had hidden
+the revolver, and you made a second search for it.  Why?  You hadn't
+heard her testimony at the inquest then.  Clark had run away.  Why
+didn't you think Clark had done it?"
+
+"Because I thought she was having an affair with another man.  I
+have always thought she did it."
+
+Bassett nodded.
+
+"I thought so.  What made you think that?"
+
+"I'll tell you.  She went West without a maid, and Mr. Clark got
+a Swedish woman from a ranch near to look after her, a woman named
+Thorwald.  She lived at her own place and came over every day.  One
+night, after Mrs. Thorwald had started home, I came across her down
+the road near the irrigator's house, and there was a man with her.
+They didn't hear me behind them, and he was giving her a note for
+some one in the house."
+
+"Why not for one of the servants?"
+
+"That's what I thought then, sir.  It wasn't my business.  But I
+saw the same man later on, hanging about the place at night, and
+once I saw her with him--Mrs. Lucas, I mean.  That was in the
+early evening.  The gentlemen were out riding, and I'd gone with
+one of the maids to a hill to watch the moon rise.  They were on
+some rocks, below in the canyon."
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"I think it was the same man, if that's what you mean.  I knew
+something queer was going on, after that, and I watched her.  She
+went out at night more than once.  Then I told Donaldson there was
+somebody hanging round the place, and he set a watch."
+
+"Fine.  Now we'll go to the night Lucas was shot.  Was the Thorwald
+woman there?"
+
+"She had started home."
+
+"Leaving Mrs. Lucas packing alone?"
+
+"Yes.  I hadn't thought of that.  The Thorwald woman heard the shot
+and came back.  I remember that, because she fainted upstairs and I
+had to carry her to a bed."
+
+"I see.  Now about the revolver."
+
+"I located it the first time I looked for it.  Donaldson and the
+others had searched the billiard room.  So I tried the big room.
+It was under a chair.  I left it there, and concealed myself in
+the room.  She, Mrs. Lucas, came down late that night and hunted
+for it.  Then she hid it where I got it later."
+
+"I wish I knew, Melis, why you didn't bring those facts out at
+the inquest."
+
+"You must remember this, sir.  I had been with Mr. Clark for a
+long time.  I knew the situation.  And I thought that he had gone
+away that night to throw suspicion from her to himself.  I was not
+certain what to do.  I would have told it all in court, but it
+never came to trial."
+
+Bassett was satisfied and fairly content.  After the Frenchman's
+departure he sat for some time, making careful notes and studying
+them.  Supposing the man Melis had seen to be Clifton Hines, a
+good many things would be cleared up.  Some new element he had to
+have, if Gregory's story were to be disproved, some new and
+different motive.  Suppose, for instance...
+
+He got up and paced the floor back and forward, forward and back.
+There was just one possibility, and just one way of verifying it.
+He sat down and wrote out a long telegram and then got his hat
+and carried it to the telegraph office himself.  He had made his
+last throw.
+
+He received a reply the following day, and in a state of
+exhilaration bordering on madness packed his bag, and as he packed
+it addressed it, after the fashion of lonely men the world over.
+
+"Just one more trip, friend cowhide," he said, "and then you and
+I are going to settle down again to work.  But it's some trip,
+old arm-breaker."
+
+He put in his pajamas and handkerchiefs, his clean socks and
+collars, and then he got his revolver from a drawer and added it.
+Just twenty-four hours later he knocked at Dick's door in a
+boarding-house on West Ninth Street, found it unlocked, and went
+in.  Dick was asleep, and Bassett stood looking down at him with
+an odd sort of paternal affection.  Finally he bent down and touched
+his shoulder.
+
+"Wake up, old top," he said.  "Wake up.  I have some news for you."
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+To Dick the last day or two had been nightmares of loneliness.  He
+threw caution to the winds and walked hour after hour, only to find
+that the street crowds, people who had left a home or were going to
+one, depressed him and emphasized his isolation.  He had deliberately
+put away from him the anchor that had been Elizabeth and had followed
+a treacherous memory, and now he was adrift.  He told himself that
+he did not want much.  Only peace, work and a place.  But he had not
+one of them.
+
+He was homesick for David, for Lucy, and, with a tightening of the
+heart he admitted it, for Elizabeth.  And he had no home.  He thought
+of Reynolds, bent over the desk in his office; he saw the quiet
+tree-shaded streets of the town, and Reynolds, passing from house
+to house in the little town, doing his work, usurping his place in
+the confidence and friendship of the people; he saw the very
+children named for him asking:  "Who was I named for, mother?"  He
+saw David and Lucy gone, and the old house abandoned, or perhaps
+echoing to the laughter of Reynolds' children.
+
+He had moments when he wondered what would happen if he took Beverly
+at her word.  Suppose she made her confession, re-opened the thing,
+to fill the papers with great headlines, "Judson Clark Not Guilty.
+A Strange Story."
+
+He saw himself going back to the curious glances of the town, never
+to be to them the same as before.  To face them and look them down,
+to hear whispers behind his back, to feel himself watched and
+judged, on that far past of his.  Suppose even that it could be kept
+out of the papers; Wilkins amiable and acquiescent, Beverly's
+confession hidden in the ruck of legal documents; and he stealing
+back, to go on as best he could, covering his absence with lies,
+and taking up his work again.  But even that uneasy road was closed
+to him.  He saw David and Lucy stooping to new and strange
+hypocrisies, watching with anxious old eyes the faces of their
+neighbors, growing defiant and hard as time went on and suspicion
+still followed him.
+
+And there was Elizabeth.
+
+He tried not to think of her, save as of some fine and tender thing
+he had once brushed as he passed by.  Even if she still cared for
+him, he could, even less than David and Lucy, ask her to walk the
+uneasy road with him.  She was young.  She would forget him and
+marry Wallace Sayre.  She would have luxury and gaiety, and the
+things that belong to youth.
+
+He was not particularly bitter about that.  He knew now that he had
+given her real love, something very different from that early
+madness of his, but he knew it too late...
+
+He looked up at Bassett and then sat up.
+
+"What sort of news?" he asked, his voice still thick with sleep.
+
+"Get up and put some cold water on your head.  I want you to get
+this."
+
+He obeyed, but without enthusiasm.  Some new clue, some hope
+revived only to die again, what did it matter?  But he stopped by
+Bassett and put a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Why do you do it?" he asked. "Why don't you let me go to the
+devil in my own way?"
+
+"I started this, and by Heaven I've finished it," was Bassett's
+exultant reply.
+
+He sat down and produced a bundle of papers.  "I'm going to read
+you something," he said.  "And when I'm through you're going to put
+your clothes on and we'll go to the Biltmore.  The Biltmore.  Do
+you get it?"
+
+Then he began to read.
+
+"I, the undersigned, being of sound mind, do hereby make the
+following statement.  I make the statement of my own free will, and
+swear before Almighty God that it is the truth.  I am an illegitimate
+son of Elihu Clark.  My mother, Harriet Burgess, has since married
+and is now known as Hattie Thorwald.  She will confirm the statements
+herein contained.
+
+"I was adopted by a woman named Hines, of the city of Omaha, whose
+name I took.  Some years later this woman married and had a
+daughter, of whom I shall speak later.
+
+"I attended preparatory school in the East, and was sent during
+vacations to a tutoring school, owned by Mr. Henry Livingstone.
+When I went to college Mr. Livingstone bought a ranch at Dry River,
+Wyoming, and I spent some time there now and then.
+
+"I learned that I was being supported and sent to college from
+funds furnished by a firm of New York lawyers, and that aroused
+my suspicion.  I knew that Mrs. Hines was not my mother.  I finally
+learned that I was the son of Elihu Clark and Harriet Burgess.
+
+"I felt that I should have some part of the estate, and I
+developed a hatred of Judson Clark, whom I knew.  I made one attempt
+to get money from him by mail, threatening to expose his father's
+story, but I did not succeed.
+
+"I visited my mother, Hattie Thorwald, and threatened to kill Clark.
+I also threatened Henry Livingstone, and his death came during a
+dispute over the matter, but I did not kill him.  He fell down and
+hit his head.  He had a weak heart.
+
+"My foster-sister had gone on the stage, and Clark was infatuated
+with her.  I saw him a number of times, but he did not connect me
+with the letter I had sent.  My foster-sister's stage name is
+Beverly Carlysle.
+
+"She married Howard Lucas and they visited the Clark ranch at
+Norada, Wyoming, in the fall of 1911.  I saw my  sister there
+several times, and as she knew the way I felt she was frightened.
+My mother, Hattie Thorwald, was a sort of maid to her, and together
+they tried to get me to go away."
+
+Bassett looked up.
+
+"Up to that point," he said, "I wrote it myself before I saw him."
+There was a note of triumph in his voice.  "The rest is his."
+
+"On the night Lucas was killed I was to go away.  Bev had agreed
+to give me some money, for the piece had quit in June and I was
+hard up.  She was going to borrow it from Jud Clark, and that set
+me crazy.  I felt it ought to be mine, or a part of it anyhow.
+
+"I was to meet my mother in the grounds, but I missed her, and I
+went to the house.  I wasn't responsible for what I did.  I was
+crazy, I guess.  I saw Donaldson on the side porch, and beyond him
+were Lucas and Clark, playing roulette.  It made me wild.  I
+couldn't have played roulette that night for pennies.
+
+"I went around the house and in the front door.  What I meant to do
+was to walk into that room and tell Clark who I was.  He knew me,
+and all I meant to do was to call Bev down, and mother, and make
+him sit up and take notice.  I hadn't a gun on me.
+
+"I swear I wasn't thinking of killing him then.  I hated him like
+poison, but that was all.  But I went into the living-room, and I
+heard Clark say he'd lost a thousand dollars.  Maybe you don't get
+that.  A thousand dollars thrown around like that, and me living
+on what Bev could borrow from him.
+
+"That sent me wild.  Lucas took a gun from him, just after that,
+and said he was going to put it in the other room.  He did it, too.
+He put it on a table and started back.  I got it and pointed it at
+Clark.  I'd have shot him, too, but Bev came into the room.
+
+"I want to exonerate Bev.  She has been better than most sisters
+to me, and she has lied to try to save me.  She came up behind me
+and grabbed my arm.  Lucas had heard her, and he turned.  I must
+have closed my hand on the trigger, for it went off and hit him.
+
+"I was in the living-room when Donaldson ran in.  I hid there until
+they were all gathered around Lucas and had quit running in, and
+then I got away.  I saw my mother in the grounds later.  I told her
+where the revolver was and that they'd better put it in the billiard
+room.  I was afraid they'd suspect Bev.
+
+"I have read the above statement and it is correct.  I was legally
+adopted by Mrs. Alice Ford Hines, of Omaha, and use that signature.
+I generally use the name of Frederick Gregory, which I took when I
+was on the stage for a short time.
+
+"(Signed) Clifton HINES."
+
+
+Bassett folded up the papers and put them in the envelope.  "I got
+that," he said, "at the point of a gun, my friend.  And our friend
+Hines departed for the Mexican border on the evening train.  I
+don't mind saying that I saw him off.  He held out for a get-away,
+and I guess it's just as well."
+
+He glanced at Dick, lying still and rigid on the bed.
+
+"And now," he said.  "I think a little drink won't do us any harm."
+
+Dick refused to drink.  He was endeavoring to comprehend the
+situation; to realize that Gregory, who had faced him with such
+sneering hate a day or so before, was his half-brother.
+
+"Poor devil!" he said at last.  "I wish to God I'd known.  He was
+right, you know.  No wonder--"
+
+Sometime later he roused from deep study and looked at Bassett.
+
+"How did you get the connection?"
+
+"I saw Melis, and learned that Hines was in it somehow.  He was the
+connecting link between Beverly Carlysle and the Thorwald woman.
+But I couldn't connect him with Beverly herself, except by a chance.
+I wired a man I knew in Omaha, and he turned up the second marriage,
+and a daughter known on the stage as Beverly Carlysle."
+
+Bassett was in high spirits.  He moved about the room immensely
+pleased with himself, slightly boastful.
+
+"Some little stroke, Dick!" he said.  "What price Mr. Judson Clark
+to-night, eh?  It will be worth a million dollars to see Wilkins'
+face when he reads that thing."
+
+"There's no mention of me as Livingstone in it, is there?"
+
+"It wasn't necessary to go into that.  I didn't know-- Look here,"
+he exploded, "you're not going to be a damned fool, are you?"
+
+"I'm not going to revive Judson Clark, Bassett.  I don't owe him
+anything.  Let him die a decent death and stay dead."
+
+"Oh, piffle!" Bassett groaned.  "Don't start that all over again.
+Don't pull any Enoch Arden stuff on me, looking in at a lighted
+window and wandering off to drive a taxicab."
+
+Suddenly Dick laughed.  Bassett watched him, puzzled and angry,
+with a sort of savage tenderness.
+
+"You're crazy," he said morosely.  "Darned if I understand you.
+Here I've got everything fixed as slick as a whistle, and it took
+work, believe me.  And now you say you're going to chuck the whole
+thing."
+
+"Not at all," Dick replied, with a new ring in his voice.  "You're
+right.  I've been ten sorts of a fool, but I know now what I'm
+going to do.  Take your paper, old friend, and for my sake go out
+and clear Jud Clark.  Put up a headstone to him, if you like, a
+good one.  I'll buy it."
+
+"And what will you be doing in the meantime?"
+
+Dick stretched and threw out his arms.
+
+"Me?" he said.  "What should I be doing, old man?  I'm going home."
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+Lucy Crosby was dead.  One moment she was of the quick, moving
+about the house, glancing in at David, having Minnie in the kitchen
+pin and unpin her veil; and the next she was still and infinitely
+mysterious, on her white bed.  She had fallen outside the door of
+David's room, and lay there, her arms still full of fresh bath
+towels, and a fixed and intense look in her eyes, as though, outside
+the door, she had come face to face with a messenger who bore
+surprising news.  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."
+
+After a time he went back to his room and got his prayer-book.
+He could hear Harrison Miller's voice soothing Minnie in the lower
+hall, and Reynolds at the telephone.  He went back into the quiet
+chamber, and opening the prayer-book, began to read aloud.
+
+"Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits
+of them that slept--"
+
+His voice tightened.  He put his head down on the side of the bed.
+
+He was very docile that day.  He moved obediently from his room for
+the awful aftermath of a death, for the sweeping and dusting and
+clean curtains, and sat in Dick's room, not reading, not even
+praying, a lonely yet indomitable old figure.  When his friends
+came, elderly men who creaked in and tried to reduce their robust
+voices to a decorous whisper, he shook hands with them and made
+brief, courteous replies.  Then he lapsed into silence.  They felt
+shut off and uncomfortable, and creaked out again.
+
+Only once did he seem shaken.  That was when Elizabeth came swiftly
+in and put her arms around him as he sat.  He held her close to him,
+saying nothing for a long time.  Then he drew a deep breath.
+
+"I was feeling mighty lonely, my dear," he said.
+
+He was the better for her visit.  He insisted on dressing that
+evening, and on being helped down the stairs.  The town, which
+had seemed inimical for so long, appeared to him suddenly to be
+holding out friendly hands.  More than friendly hands.  Loving,
+tender hands, offering service and affection and old-time
+friendship.  It moved about sedately, in dark clothes, and came
+down the stairs red-eyed and using pocket-hand-kerchiefs, and it
+surrounded him with love and loving kindness.
+
+When they had all gone Harrison Miller helped him up the stairs to
+where his tidy bed stood ready, and the nurse had placed his hot
+milk on a stand.  But Harrison did not go at once.
+
+"What about word to Dick, David?" he inquired awkwardly, "I've
+called up Bassett, but he's away.  And I don't know that Dick ought
+to come back anyhow.  If the police are on the job at all they'll
+be on the lookout now.  They'll know he may try to come."
+
+David looked away.  Just how much he wanted Dick, to tide him over
+these bad hours, only David knew.  But he could not have him.  He
+stared at the glass of hot milk.
+
+"I guess I can fight this out alone, Harrison," he said.  "And Lucy
+will understand."
+
+He did not sleep much that night.  Once or twice he got up and
+tip-toed across the hall into Lucy's room and looked at her.  She
+was as white as her pillow, and quite serene.  Her hands, always a
+little rough and twisted with service, were smooth and rested.
+
+"You know why he can't come, Lucy," he said once.  "It doesn't
+mean that he doesn't care.  You have to remember that."  His
+sublime faith that she heard and understood, not the Lucy on the
+bed but the Lucy who had not yet gone on to the blessed company
+of heaven, carried him back to his bed, comforted and reassured.
+
+He was up and about his room early.  The odor of baking muffins
+and frying ham came up the stair-well, and the sound of Mike
+vigorously polishing the floor in the hall.  Mixed with the odor
+of cooking and of floor wax was the scent of flowers from Lucy's
+room, and Mrs. Sayre's machine stopped at the door while the
+chauffeur delivered a great mass of roses.
+
+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.  When Bassett's wire came from Norada, "All clear," he
+set out for Haverly, more nearly happy than for months.  The very
+rhythm of the train sang: "Going home; going home."
+
+At the Haverly station the agent stopped, stared at him and then
+nodded gravely.  There was something restrained in his greeting,
+like the voices in the old house the night before, and Dick felt
+a chill of apprehension.  He never thought of Lucy, but David...
+The flowers and ribbon at the door were his first intimation, and
+still it was David he thought of.  He went cold and bitter, standing
+on the freshly washed pavement, staring at them.  It was all too
+late.  David!  David!
+
+He went into the house slowly, and the heavy scent of flowers
+greeted him.  The hall was empty, and automatically he pushed open
+the door to David's office and went in.  David was at the desk
+writing.  David was alive.  Thank God and thank God, David was alive.
+
+"David!" he said brokenly.  "Dear old David!" And was suddenly
+shaken with dry, terrible sobbing.
+
+There was a great deal to do, and Dick was grateful for it.  But
+first, like David, he went in and sat by Lucy's bed alone and talked
+to her.  Not aloud, as David did, but still with that same queer
+conviction that she heard.  He told her he was free, and that she
+need not worry about David, that he was there now to look after him;
+and he asked her, if she could, to help him with Elizabeth.  Then
+he kissed her and went out.
+
+He met Elizabeth that day.  She had come to the house, and after
+her custom now went up, unwarned, to David's room.  She found David
+there and Harrison Miller, and--it was a moment before she realized
+it--Dick by the mantel.  He was greatly changed.  She saw that.
+But she had no feeling of pity, nor even of undue surprise.  She
+felt nothing at all.  It gave her a curious, almost hard little
+sense of triumph to see that he had gone pale.  She marched up to
+him and held out her hand, mindful of the eyes on her.
+
+"I'm so very sorry, Dick," she said.  "You have a sad home-coming."
+
+Then she withdrew her hand, still calm, and turned to David.
+
+"Mother sent over some things.  I'll give them to Minnie," she said,
+her voice clear and steady.  She went out, and they heard her
+descending the stairs.
+
+She was puzzled to find out that her knees almost gave way on the
+staircase, for she felt calm and without any emotion whatever.
+And she finished her errand, so collected and poised that the two
+or three women who had come in to help stared after her as she
+departed.
+
+"Do you suppose she's seen him?"
+
+"She was in David's room.  She must have."
+
+Mindful of Mike, they withdrew into Lucy's sitting-room and closed
+the door, there to surmise and to wonder.  Did he know she was
+engaged to Wallie Sayre?  Would she break her engagement now or not?
+Did Dick for a moment think that he could do as he had done, go away
+and jilt a girl, and come back to be received as though nothing had
+happened?  Because, if he did...
+
+To Dick Elizabeth's greeting had been a distinct shock.  He had not
+known just what he had expected; certainly he had not hoped to pick
+things up where he had dropped them.  But there was a hard
+friendliness in it that was like a slap in the face.  He had meant
+at least to fight to win back with her, but he saw now that there
+would not even be a fight.  She was not angry or hurt.  The barrier
+was more hopeless than that.
+
+David, watching him, waited until Harrison had gone, and went
+directly to the subject.
+
+"Have you ever stopped to think what these last months have meant
+to Elizabeth?  Her own worries, and always this infernal town,
+talking, talking.  The child's pride's been hurt, as well as her
+heart."
+
+"I thought I'd better not go into that until after--until later," he
+explained.  "The other thing was wrong.  I knew it the moment I saw
+Beverly and I didn't go back again.  What was the use?  But--you
+saw her face, David.  I think she doesn't even care enough to hate me."
+
+"She's cared enough to engage herself to Wallace Sayre!"
+
+After one astounded glance Dick laughed bitterly.
+
+"That looks as though she cared!" he said.  He had gone very white.
+After a time, as David sat silent and thoughtful, he said:  "After
+all, what right had I to expect anything else?  When you think that,
+a few days ago, I was actually shaken at the thought of seeing
+another woman, you can hardly blame her."
+
+"She waited a long time."
+
+Later Dick made what was a difficult confession under the
+circumstances.
+
+"I know now--I think I knew all along, but the other thing was
+like that craving for liquor I told you about--I know now that
+she has always been the one woman.  You'll understand that, perhaps,
+but she wouldn't.  I would crawl on my knees to make her believe it,
+but it's too late.  Everything's too late," he added.
+
+Before the hour for the services he went in again and sat by Lucy's
+bed, but she who had given him wise counsel so many times before
+lay in her majestic peace, surrounded by flowers and infinitely
+removed.  Yet she gave him something.  Something of her own peace.
+Once more, as on the night she had stood at the kitchen door and
+watched him disappear in the darkness, there came the tug of the
+old familiar things, the home sense.  Not only David now, but the
+house.  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.  From it and from her in the dream he was to go out in
+the morning; to it and to her he was to come home at night, after
+he had done a man's work.
+
+The dream faded.  Before him rose her face of the morning,
+impassive and cool; her eyes, not hostile but indifferent.  She
+had taken herself out of his life, had turned her youth to youth,
+and forgotten him.  He understood and accepted it.  He saw himself
+as he must have looked to her, old and worn, scarred from the last
+months, infinitely changed.  And she was young.  Heavens, how
+young she was!...
+
+Lucy was buried the next afternoon.  It was raining, and the quiet
+procession followed Dick and the others who carried her light body
+under grotesquely bobbing umbrellas.  Then he and David, and Minnie
+and Mike, went back to the house, quiet with that strange emptiness
+that follows a death, the unconscious listening for a voice that
+will not speak again, for a familiar footfall.  David had not gone
+upstairs.  He sat in Lucy's sitting-room, in his old frock coat and
+black tie, with a knitted afghan across his knees.  His throat
+looked withered in his loose collar.  And there for the first time
+they discussed the future.
+
+"You're giving up a great deal, Dick," David said.  "I'm proud of
+you, and like you I think the money's best where it is.  But this
+is a prejudiced town, and they think you've treated Elizabeth badly.
+If you don't intend to tell the story--"
+
+"Never," Dick announced, firmly.  "Judson Clark is dead."  He smiled
+at David with something of his old humor.  "I told Bassett to put up
+a monument if he wanted to.  But you're right about one thing.
+They're not ready to take me back.  I've seen it a dozen times in
+the last two days."
+
+"I never gave up a fight yet."  David's voice was grim.
+
+"On the other hand, I don't want to make it uncomfortable for her.
+We are bound to meet.  I'm putting my own feeling aside.  It doesn't
+matter--except of course to me.  What I thought was-- We might go
+into the city.  Reynolds would buy the house.  He's going to be
+married."
+
+But he found himself up against the stone wall of David's opposition.
+He was too old to be uprooted.  He liked to be able to find his way
+around in the dark.  He was almost childish about it, and perhaps a
+trifle terrified.  But it was his final argument that won Dick over.
+
+"I thought you'd found out there's nothing in running away from
+trouble."
+
+Dick straightened.
+
+"You're right," he said.  "We'll stay here and fight it out together."
+
+He helped David up the stairs to where the nurse stood waiting,
+and then went on into his own bedroom.  He surveyed it for the
+first time since his return with a sense of permanency and intimacy.
+Here, from now on, was to center his life.  From this bed he would
+rise in the morning, to go back to it at night.  From this room he
+would go out to fight for place again, and for the old faith in him,
+for confiding eyes and the clasp of friendly hands.
+
+He sat down by the window and with the feeling of dismissing them
+forever retraced slowly and painfully the last few months; the
+night on the mountains, and Bassett asleep by the fire; the man
+from the cabin caught under the tree, with his face looking up,
+strangely twisted, from among the branches; dawn in the alfalfa
+field, and the long night tramp; the boy who had recognized him
+in Chicago; David in his old walnut bed, shrivelled and dauntless;
+and his own going out into the night, with Lucy in the kitchen
+doorway, Elizabeth and Wallace Sayre on the verandah, and himself
+across the street under the trees; Beverly, and the illumination
+of his freedom from the old bonds; Gregory, glib and debonair,
+telling his lying story, and later on, flying to safety.
+His half-brother!
+
+All that, and now this quiet room, with David asleep beyond the
+wall and Minnie moving heavily in the kitchen below, setting her
+bread to rise.  It was anti-climacteric, ridiculous, wonderful.
+
+Then he thought of Elizabeth, and it became terrible.
+
+After Reynolds came up he put on a dressing-gown and went down the
+stairs.  The office was changed and looked strange and unfamiliar.
+But when he opened the door and went into the laboratory nothing
+had been altered there.  It was as though he had left it yesterday;
+the microscope screwed to its stand, the sterilizer gleaming and
+ready.  It was as though it had waited for him.
+
+He was content.  He would fight and he would work.  That was all
+a man needed, a good fight, and work for his hands and brain.  A
+man could live without love if he had work.
+
+
+He sat down on the stool and groaned.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+One thing Dick knew must be done and got over with.  He would have
+to see Elizabeth and tell her the story.  He knew it would do no
+good, but she had a right to the fullest explanation he could give
+her.  She did not love him, but it was intolerable that she should
+hate him.
+
+He meant, however, to make no case for himself.  He would have to
+stand on the facts.  This thing had happened to him; the storm had
+come, wrought its havoc and passed; he was back, to start again as
+nearly as he could where he had left off.  That was all.
+
+He went to the Wheeler house the next night, passing the door twice
+before he turned in and rang the bell, in order that his voice might
+be calm and his demeanor unshaken.  But the fact that Micky, waiting
+on the porch, knew him and broke into yelps of happiness and ecstatic
+wriggling almost lost him his self-control.
+
+Walter Wheeler opened the door and admitted him.
+
+"I thought you might come," he said.  "Come in."
+
+There was no particular warmth in his voice, but no unfriendliness.
+He stood by gravely while Dick took off his overcoat, and then led
+the way into the library.
+
+"I'd better tell you at once," he said, "that I have advised
+Elizabeth to see you, but that she refuses.  I'd much prefer--"
+He busied himself at the fire for a moment.  "I'd much prefer to
+have her see you, Livingstone.  But--I'll tell you frankly--I
+don't think it would do much good."
+
+He sat down and stared at the fire.  Dick remained standing.  "She
+doesn't intend to see me at all?" he asked, unsteadily.
+
+"That's rather out of the question, if you intend to remain here.
+Do you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+An unexpected feeling of sympathy for the tall young man on the
+hearth rug stirred in Walter Wheeler's breast.
+
+"I'm sorry, Dick.  She apparently reached the breaking point a week
+or two ago.  She knew you had been here and hadn't seen her, for
+one thing."  He hesitated.  "You've heard of her engagement?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I didn't want it," her father said drearily.  "I suppose she knows
+her own business, but the thing's done.  She sent you a message," he
+added after a pause.  "She's glad it's cleared up and I believe you
+are not to allow her to drive you away.  She thinks David needs you."
+
+"Thank you.  I'll have to stay, as she says."
+
+There was another uncomfortable silence.  Then Walter Wheeler burst
+out:
+
+"Confound it, Dick, I'm sorry.  I've fought your battles for months,
+not here, but everywhere.  But here's a battle I can't fight.  She
+isn't angry.  You'll have to get her angle of it.  I think it's
+something like this.  She had built you up into a sort of superman.
+And she's--well, I suppose purity is the word.  She's the essence
+of purity.  Then, Leslie told me this to-night, she learned from
+him that you were back with the woman in the case, in New York."
+
+And, as Dick made a gesture:
+
+"There's no use going to him.  He was off the beaten track, and he
+knows it.  He took a chance, to tell her for her own good.  He's
+fond of her.  I suppose that was the last straw."
+
+He sat still, a troubled figure, middle-aged and unhandsome, and
+very weary.
+
+"It's a bad business, Dick," he said.
+
+After a time Dick stirred.
+
+"When I first began to remember," he said, "I wanted whisky.  I
+would have stolen it, if I couldn't have got it any other way.
+Then, when I got it, I didn't want it.  It sickened me.  This other
+was the same sort of thing.  It's done with."
+
+Wheeler nodded.
+
+"I understand.  But she wouldn't, Dick."
+
+"No.  I don't suppose she would."
+
+He went away soon after that, back to the quiet house and to David.
+Automatically he turned in at his office, but Reynolds was writing
+there.  He went slowly up the stairs.
+
+Ann Sayre was frankly puzzled during the next few days.  She had
+had a week or so of serenity and anticipation, and although things
+were not quite as she would have had them, Elizabeth too impassive
+and even Wallie rather restrained in his happiness, she was
+satisfied.  But Dick Livingstone's return had somehow changed
+everything.
+
+It had changed Wallie, too.  He was suddenly a man, and not, she
+suspected, a very happy man.  He came back one day, for instance,
+to say that he had taken a partnership in a brokerage office, and
+gave as his reason that he was sick of "playing round."  She rather
+thought it was to take his mind off something.
+
+A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds.  "I
+caught cold at the cemetery," she said, when he had arrived and
+was seated opposite her in her boudoir.  "I really did," she
+protested, as she caught his eye.  "I suppose everybody is sending
+for you, to have a chance to talk."
+
+"Just about."
+
+"You can't blame us.  Particularly, you can't blame me.  I've got
+to know something, doctor.  Is he going to stay?"
+
+"I think so.  Yes."
+
+"Isn't he going to explain anything?  He can't expect just to walk
+back into his practise after all these months, and the talk that's
+been going on, and do nothing about it."
+
+"I don't see what his going away has to do with it.  He's a good
+doctor, and a hard worker.  When I'm gone--"
+
+"You're going, are you?"
+
+"Yes.  I may live here, and have an office in the city.  I don't
+care for general practise; there's no future in it.  I may take a
+special course in nose and throat."
+
+But she was not interested in his plans.
+
+"I want to know something, and only you can tell me.  I'm not
+curious like the rest; I think I have a right to know.  Has he
+seen Elizabeth Wheeler yet?  Talked to her, I mean?"
+
+"I don't know.  I'm inclined to think not," he added cautiously.
+
+"You mean that he hasn't?"
+
+"Look here, Mrs. Sayre.  You've confided in me, and I know it's
+important to you.  I don't know a thing.  I'm to stay on until the
+end of the week, and then he intends to take hold.  I'm in and out,
+see him at meals, and we've had a little desultory talk.  There is
+no trouble between the two families.  Mr. Wheeler comes and goes.
+If you ask me, I think Livingstone has simply accepted the situation
+as he found it."
+
+"He isn't going to explain anything?  He'll have to, I think, if he
+expects to practise here.  There have been all sorts of stories."
+
+"I don't know, Mrs. Sayre."
+
+"How is Doctor David?" she asked, after a pause.
+
+"Better.  It wouldn't surprise me now to see him mend rapidly."
+
+He met Elizabeth on his way down the hill, a strange, bright-eyed
+Elizabeth, carrying her head high and a bit too jauntily, and with
+a sort of hot defiance in her eyes.  He drove on, thoughtfully.
+All this turmoil and trouble, anxiety and fear, and all that was
+left a crushed and tragic figure of a girl, and two men in an old
+house, preparing to fight that one of them might regain the place
+he had lost.
+
+It would be a fight.  Reynolds saw the village already divided into
+two camps, a small militant minority, aligned with Dick and David,
+and a waiting, not particularly hostile but intensely curious
+majority, who would demand certain things before Dick's
+reinstatement in their confidence.
+
+Elizabeth Wheeler was an unconscious party to the division.  It was,
+in a way, her battle they were fighting.  And Elizabeth had gone
+over to the enemy.
+
+Late that afternoon Ann Sayre had her first real talk with Wallie
+since Dick's return.  She led him out onto the terrace, her
+shoulders militant and her head high, and faced him there.
+
+"I can see you are not going to talk to me," she said.  "So I'll
+talk to you.  Has Dick Livingstone's return made any change between
+Elizabeth and you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"She's just the same to you?  You must tell me, Wallace.  I've been
+building so much."
+
+She realized the change in him then more fully than ever for he
+faced her squarely and without evasion.
+
+"There's no change in her, mother, but I think you and I will both
+have to get used to this: she's not in love with me.  She doesn't
+pretend to be."
+
+"Don't tell me it's still that man!"
+
+"I don't know."  He took a turn or two about the terrace.  "I don't
+think it is, mother.  I don't think she cares for anybody, that way,
+certainly not for me.  And that's the trouble."  He faced her again.
+"If marrying me isn't going to make her happy, I won't hold her to
+it.  You'll have to support me in that, mother.  I'm a pretty weak
+sister sometimes."
+
+That appeal touched her as nothing had done for a long time.  "I'll
+help all I can, if the need comes," she said, and turned and went
+heavily into the house.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+David was satisfied.  The great love of his life had been given to
+Dick, and now Dick was his again.  He grieved for Lucy, but he
+knew that the parting was not for long, and that from whatever
+high place she looked down she would know that.  He was satisfied.
+He looked on his work and found it good.  There was no trace of
+weakness nor of vacillation in the man who sat across from him at
+the table, or slammed in and out of the house after his old fashion.
+
+But he was not content.  At first it was enough to have Dick there,
+to stop in the doorway of his room and see him within, occupied
+with the prosaic business of getting into his clothes or out of
+them, now and then to put a hand on his shoulder, to hear him
+fussing in the laboratory again, and to be called to examine divers
+and sundry smears to which Dick attached impressive importance and
+more impressive names.  But behind Dick's surface cheerfulness he
+knew that he was eating his heart out.
+
+And there was nothing to be done.  Nothing.  Secretly David watched
+the papers for the announcement of Elizabeth's engagement, and each
+day drew a breath of relief when it did not come.  And he had done
+another thing secretly, too; he did not tell Dick when her ring came
+back.  Annie had brought the box, without a letter, and the
+incredible cruelty of the thing made David furious.  He stamped into
+his office and locked it in a drawer, with the definite intention of
+saving Dick that one additional pang at a time when he already had
+enough to hear.
+
+For things were going very badly.  The fight was on.
+
+It was a battle without action.  Each side was dug in and entrenched,
+and waiting.  It was an engagement where the principals met
+occasionally the neutral ground of the streets, bowed to each other
+and passed on.
+
+The town was sorry for David and still fond of him, but it resented
+his stiff-necked attitude.  It said, in effect, that when he ceased
+to make Dick's enemies his it was willing to be friends.  But it
+said also, to each other and behind its hands, that Dick's absence
+was discreditable or it would be explained, and that he had behaved
+abominably to Elizabeth.  It would be hanged if it would be friends
+with him.
+
+It looked away, but it watched.  Dick knew that when he passed by
+on the streets it peered at him from behind its curtains, and
+whispered behind his back.  Now and then he saw, on his evening
+walks, that line of cars drawn up before houses he had known and
+frequented which indicated a party, but he was never asked.  He
+never told David.
+
+It was only when the taboo touched David that Dick was resentful,
+and then he was inclined to question the wisdom of his return.
+It hurt him, for instance, to see David give up his church, and
+reading morning prayer alone at home on Sunday mornings, and to
+see his grim silence when some of his old friends were mentioned.
+
+Yet on the surface things were much as they had been.  David rose
+early, and as he improved in health, read his morning paper in his
+office while he waited for breakfast.  Doctor Reynolds had gone,
+and the desk in Dick's office was back where it belonged.  In the
+mornings Mike oiled the car in the stable and washed it, his old
+pipe clutched in his teeth, while from the kitchen came the sounds
+of pans and dishes, and the odor of frying sausages.  And Dick
+splashed in the shower, and shaved by the mirror with the cracked
+glass in the bathroom.  But he did not sing.
+
+The house was very quiet.  Now and then the front door opened, and
+a patient came in, but there was no longer the crowded waiting-room,
+the incessant jangle of the telephone, the odor of pungent drugs
+and antiseptics.
+
+When, shortly before Christmas, Dick looked at the books containing
+the last quarter's accounts, he began to wonder how long they could
+fight their losing battle.  He did not mind for himself, but it was
+unthinkable that David should do without, one by one, the small
+luxuries of his old age, his cigars, his long and now errandless
+rambles behind Nettie.
+
+He began then to think of his property, his for the claiming, and
+to question whether he had not bought his peace at too great a
+cost to David.  He knew by that time that it was not fear, but
+pride, which had sent him back empty-handed, the pride of making
+his own way.  And now and then, too, he felt a perfectly human
+desire to let Bassett publish the story as his vindication and
+then snatch David away from them all, to some luxurious haven
+where--that was the point at which he always stopped--where David
+could pine away in homesickness for them!
+
+There was an irony in it that made him laugh hopelessly.
+
+He occupied himself then with ways and means, and sold the car.
+Reynolds, about to be married and busily furnishing a city office,
+bought it, had it repainted a bright blue, and signified to the
+world at large that he was at the Rossiter house every night by
+leaving it at the curb.  Sometimes, on long country tramps, Dick
+saw it outside a farmhouse, and knew that the boycott was not
+limited to the town.
+
+By Christmas, however, he realized that the question of meeting
+their expenses necessitated further economies, and reluctantly at
+last they decided to let Mike go.  Dick went out to the stable with
+a distinct sinking of the heart, while David sat in the house,
+unhappily waiting for the thing to be done.  But Mike refused to
+be discharged.
+
+"And is it discharging me you are?" he asked, putting down one of
+David's boots in his angry astonishment.  "Well, then, I'm telling
+you you're not."
+
+"We can't pay you any longer, Mike.  And now that the car's gone--"
+
+"I'm not thinking about pay.  I'm not going, and that's flat.
+Who'd be after doing his boots and all?"
+
+David called him in that night and dismissed him again, this time
+very firmly.  Mike said nothing and went out, but the next morning
+he was scrubbing the sidewalk as usual, and after that they gave
+it up.
+
+Now and then Dick and Elizabeth met on the street, and she bowed
+to him and went on.  At those times it seemed incredible that once
+he had held her in his arms, and that she had looked up at him with
+loving, faithful eyes.  He suffered so from those occasional
+meetings that he took to watching for her, so as to avoid her.
+Sometimes he wished she would marry Wallace quickly, so he would
+be obliged to accept what now he knew he had not accepted at all.
+
+He had occasional spells of violent anger at her, and of resentment,
+but they died when he checked up, one after the other, the inevitable
+series of events that had led to the catastrophe.  But it was all
+nonsense to say that love never died.  She had loved him, and there
+was never anything so dead as that love of hers.
+
+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."
+
+"Perhaps.  I don't know."
+
+"They'll drive him to doing it yet.  He came back to make a place
+for himself again, like a man.  Not what he had, but what he was.
+But they'll drive him away, mark my words."
+
+Later on, but more gently, he introduced the subject of Elizabeth.
+
+"You can't get away from this, Mrs. Wheeler.  So long as she stands
+off, and you behind her, the town is going to take her side.  She
+doesn't know it, but that's how it stands.  It all hangs on her.
+If he wasn't the man he is, I'd say his salvation hangs on her.  I
+don't mean she ought to take him back; it's too late for that, if
+she's engaged.  But a little friendliness and kindness wouldn't do
+any harm.  You too.  Do you ever have him here?"
+
+"How can I, as things are?"
+
+"Well, be friendly, anyhow," he argued.  "That's not asking much.
+I suppose he'd cut my throat if he knew, but I'm a
+straight-to-the-mark sort of person, and I know this: what this
+house does the town will do."
+
+"I'll talk to Mr. Wheeler.  I don't know.  I'll say this, Mr.
+Bassett.  I won't make her unhappy.  She has borne a great deal,
+and sometimes I think her life is spoiled.  She is very different."
+
+"If she is suffering, isn't it possible she cares for him?"
+
+But Margaret did not think so.  She was so very calm.  She was so
+calm that sometimes it was alarming.
+
+"He gave her a ring, and the other day I found it, tossed into a
+drawer full of odds and ends.  I haven't seen it lately; she may
+have sent it back."
+
+Elizabeth came home shortly before Christmas, undeniably glad to
+be back and very gentle with them all.  She set to work almost
+immediately on the gifts, wrapping them and tying them with
+methodical exactness, sticking a tiny sprig of holly through
+the ribbon bow, and writing cards with neatness and care.  She
+hung up wreaths and decorated the house, and when she was through
+with her work she went to her room and sat with her hands folded,
+not thinking.  She did not think any more.
+
+Wallie had sent her a flexible diamond bracelet as a Christmas gift
+and it lay on her table in its box.  She was very grateful, but
+she had not put it on.
+
+On the morning before Christmas Nina came in, her arms full of
+packages, and her eyes shining and a little frightened.  She had
+some news for them.  She hadn't been so keen about it, at first,
+but Leslie was like a madman.  He was so pleased that he was
+ordering her that sable cape she had wanted so.  He was like a
+different man.  And it would be July.
+
+Elizabeth kissed her.  It seemed very unreal, like everything else.
+She wondered why Leslie should be so excited, or her mother crying.
+She wondered if there was something strange about her, that it
+should see so small and unimportant.  But then, what was important?
+That one got up in the morning, and ate at intervals, and went to
+bed at night?  That children came, and had to be fed and washed
+and tended, and cried a great deal, and were sick now and then?
+
+She wished she could feel something, could think it vital whether
+Nina should choose pink or blue for her layette, and how far she
+should walk each day, and if the chauffeur drove the car carefully
+enough.  She wished she cared whether it was going to rain to-morrow
+or not, or whether some one was coming, or not coming.  And she
+wished terribly that she could care for Wallie, or get over the
+feeling that she had saved her pride at a cost to him she would not
+contemplate.
+
+After a time she went upstairs and put on the bracelet.  And late
+in the afternoon she went out and bought some wool, to make an
+afghan.  It eased her conscience toward Nina.  She commenced it
+that evening while she waited for Wallie, and she wondered if
+some time she would be making an afghan for a coming child of her
+own.  Hers and Wallace Sayre's.
+
+Suddenly she knew she would never marry him.  She faced the future,
+with all that it implied, and she knew she could not do it.  It was
+horrible that she had even contemplated it.  It would be terrible
+to tell Wallie, but not as terrible as the other thing.  She saw
+herself then with the same clearness with which she had judged Dick.
+She too, leaving her havoc of wrecked lives behind her; she too
+going along her headstrong way, raising hopes not to be fulfilled,
+and passing on.  She too.
+
+That evening, Christmas eve, she told Wallie she would not marry
+him.  Told him very gently, and just after an attempt of his to
+embrace her.  She would not let him do it.
+
+"I don't know what's come over you," he said morosely.  "But I'll
+let you alone, if that's the way you feel."
+
+"I'm sorry, Wallie.  It--it makes me shiver."
+
+In a way he was prepared for it but nevertheless he begged for
+time, for a less unequivocal rejection.  But he found her, for the
+first time, impatient with his pleadings.
+
+"I don't want to go over and over it, Wallie.  I'll take the blame.
+I should have done it long ago."
+
+She was gentle, almost tender with him, but when he said she had
+spoiled his life for him she smiled faintly.
+
+"You think that now.  And don't believe I'm not sorry.  I am.  I
+hate not playing the game, as you say.  But I don't think for a
+moment that you'll go on caring when you know I don't.  That doesn't
+happen.  That's all."
+
+"Do you know what I think?" he burst out.  "I think you're still
+mad about Livingstone.  I think you are so mad about him that you
+don't know it yourself."
+
+But she only smiled her cool smile and went on with her knitting.
+After that he got himself in hand, and--perhaps he still had some
+hope.  It was certain that she had not flinched at Dick's name
+--told her very earnestly that he only wanted her happiness.  He
+didn't want her unless she wanted him.  He would always love her.
+
+"Not always," she said, with tragically cold certainty.  "Men are
+not like women; they forget."
+
+She wondered, after he had gone, what had made her say that.
+
+She did not tell the family that night.  They were full of their
+own concerns, Nina's coming maternity, the wrapping of packages
+behind closed doors, the final trimming of the tree in the library.
+Leslie had started the phonograph, and it was playing "Stille Nacht,
+heilige Nacht."
+
+Still night, holy night, and only in her was there a stillness that
+was not holy.
+
+They hung up their stockings valiantly as usual, making a little
+ceremony of it, and being careful not to think about Jim's missing
+one.  Indeed, they made rather a function of it, and Leslie
+demanded one of Nina's baby socks and pinned it up.
+
+"I'm starting a bank account for the little beggar," he said, and
+dropped a gold piece into the toe.  "Next year, old girl"
+
+He put his arm around Nina.  It seemed to him that life was doing
+considerably better than he deserved by him, and he felt very
+humble and contrite.  He felt in his pocket for the square jeweler's
+box that lay there.
+
+After that they left Walter Wheeler there, to play his usual part
+at such times, and went upstairs.  He filled the stockings bravely,
+an orange in each toe, a box of candy, a toy for old time's sake,
+and then the little knickknacks he had been gathering for days and
+hiding in his desk.  After all, there were no fewer stockings this
+year than last.  Instead of Jim's there was the tiny one for Nina's
+baby.  That was the way things went.  He took away, but also He gave.
+
+He sat back in his deep chair, and looked up at the stockings,
+ludicrously bulging.  After all, if he believed that He gave and
+took away, then he must believe that Jim was where he had tried to
+think him, filling a joyous, active place in some boyish heaven.
+
+After a while he got up and went to his desk, and getting pen and
+paper wrote carefully.
+
+"Dearest: You will find this in your stocking in the morning, when
+you get up for the early service.  And I want you to think over it
+in the church.  It is filled with tenderness and with anxiety.
+Life is not so very long, little daughter, and it has no time to
+waste in anger or in bitterness.  A little work, a little sleep, a
+little love, and it is all over.
+
+"Will you think of this to-day?"
+
+He locked up the house, and went slowly up to bed.  Elizabeth found
+the letter the next morning.  She stood in the bleak room, with the
+ashes of last night's fire still smoking, and the stockings
+overhead not festive in the gray light, but looking forlorn and
+abandoned.  Suddenly her eyes, dry and fiercely burning for so long,
+were wet with tears.  It was true.  It was true.  A little work, a
+little sleep, a little love.  Not the great love, perhaps, not the
+only love of a man's life.  Not the love of yesterday, but of
+to-day and to-morrow.
+
+All the fierce repression of the last weeks was gone.  She began
+to suffer.  She saw Dick coming home, perhaps high with hope that
+whatever she knew she would understand and forgive.  And she saw
+herself failing him, cold and shut away, not big enough nor woman
+enough to meet him half way.  She saw him fighting his losing
+battle alone, protecting David but never himself; carrying Lucy
+to her quiet grave; sitting alone in his office, while the village
+walked by and stared at the windows; she saw him, gaining harbor
+after storm, and finding no anchorage there.
+
+She turned and went, half blindly, into the empty street.
+
+She thought he was at the early service.  She did not see him, but
+she had once again the thing that had seemed lost forever, the
+warm sense of his thought of her.
+
+He was there, in the shadowy back pew, with the grill behind it
+through which once insistent hands had reached to summon him.  He
+was there, with Lucy's prayer-book in his hand, and none of the
+peace of the day in his heart.  He knelt and rose with the others.
+
+"O God, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth
+of Thy Son--"
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+David was beaten; most tragic defeat of all, beaten by those he
+had loved and faithfully served.
+
+He did not rise on Christmas morning, and Dick, visiting him after
+an almost untasted breakfast, found him still in his bed and
+questioned him anxiously.
+
+"I'm all right," he asserted.  "I'm tired, Dick, that's all.  Tired
+of fighting.  You're young.  You can carry it on, and win.  But I'll
+never see it.  They're stronger than we are."
+
+Later he elaborated on that.  He had kept the faith.  He had run
+with courage the race that was set before him.  He had stayed up
+at night and fought for them.  But he couldn't fight against them.
+
+Dick went downstairs again and shutting himself in his office fell
+to pacing the floor.  David was right, the thing was breaking him.
+Very seriously now he contemplated abandoning the town, taking
+David with him, and claiming his estate.  They could travel then;
+he could get consultants in Europe; there were baths there, and
+treatments--
+
+The doorbell rang.  He heard Minnie's voice in the hail, not too
+friendly, and her tap at the door.
+
+"Some one in the waiting-room," she called.
+
+When he opened the connecting door he found Elizabeth beyond it,
+a pale and frightened Elizabeth, breathless and very still.  It
+was a perceptible moment before he could control his voice to speak.
+Then:
+
+"I suppose you want to see David.  I'm sorry, but he isn't well
+to-day.  He is still in bed."
+
+"I didn't come to see David, Dick."
+
+"I cannot think you want to see me, Elizabeth."
+
+"I do, if you don't mind."
+
+He stood aside then and let her pass him into the rear office.
+
+But he was not fooled at all.  Not he.  He had been enough.  He
+knew why she had come, in the kindness of heart.  (She was so
+little.  Good heavens, a man could crush her to nothing!) She had
+come because she was sorry for him, and she had brought forgiveness.
+It was like her. It was fine.  It was damnable.
+
+His voice hardened, for fear it might be soft.
+
+"Is this a professional visit, or a Christmas call, Elizabeth?  Or
+perhaps I shouldn't call you that."
+
+"A Christmas call?"
+
+"You know what I mean.  The day of peace.  The day--what do you
+think I'm made of, Elizabeth?  To have you here, gentle and good
+and kind--"
+
+He got up and stood over her, tall and almost threatening.
+
+"You've been to church, and you've been thinking things over, I
+know.  I was there.  I heard it all, peace on earth, goodwill to
+men.  Bosh.  Peace, when there is no peace.  Good will!  I don't
+want your peace and good will."
+
+She looked up at him timidly.
+
+"You don't want to be friends, then?"
+
+"No.  A thousand times, no," he said violently.  Then, more gently:
+"I'm making a fool of myself.  I want your peace and good will,
+Elizabeth.  God knows I need them."
+
+"You frighten me, Dick," she said, slowly.  "I didn't come to bring
+forgiveness, if that is what you mean.  I came--"
+
+"Don't tell me you came to ask it.  That would be more than I can
+bear."
+
+"Will you listen to me for a moment, Dick?  I am not good at
+explaining things, and I'm nervous.  I suppose you can see that."
+She tried to smile at him.  "A--a little work, a sleep, a little
+love, that's life, isn't it?"
+
+He was watching her intently.
+
+"Work and trouble, and a long sleep at the end for which let us be
+duly thankful--that's life, too.  Love?  Not every one gets love."
+
+Hopelessness and despair overwhelmed her.  He was making it hard
+for her.  Impossible.  She could not go on.
+
+"I did not come with peace," she said tremulously, "but if you don't
+want it--" She rose.  "I must say this, though, before I go.  I
+blame myself.  I don't blame you.  You are wrong if you think I came
+to forgive you."
+
+She was stumbling toward the door.
+
+"Elizabeth, what did bring you?"
+
+She turned to him, with her hand on the door knob.  "I came because
+I wanted to see you again."
+
+He strode after her and catching her by the arm, turned her until
+he faced her.
+
+"And why did you want to see me again?  You can't still care for me.
+You know the story.  You know I was here and didn't see you.  You've
+seen Leslie Ward.  You know my past.  What you don't know--"
+
+He looked down into her eyes.  "A little work, a little sleep, a
+little love," he repeated.  "What did you mean by that?"
+
+"Just that," she said simply.  "Only not a little love, Dick. Maybe
+you don't want me now.  I don't know.  I have suffered so much that
+I'm not sure of anything."
+
+"Want you!" he said.  "More than anything on this earth."
+
+Bassett was at his desk in the office.  It was late, and the night
+editor, seeing him reading the early edition, his feet on his desk,
+carried over his coffee and doughnuts and joined him.
+
+"Sometime," he said, "I'm going to get that Clark story out of you.
+If it wasn't you who turned up the confession, I'll eat it."
+
+Bassett yawned.
+
+"Have it your own way," he said indifferently.  "You were shielding
+somebody, weren't you?  No?  What's the answer?"
+
+Bassett made no reply.  He picked up the paper and pointed to an
+item with the end of his pencil.
+
+"Seen this?"
+
+The night editor read it with bewilderment.  He glanced up.
+
+"What's that got to do with the Clark case?"
+
+"Nothing.  Nice people, though.  Know them both."
+
+When the night editor walked away, rather affronted, Bassett took
+up the paper and reread the paragraph.
+
+"Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wheeler, of Haverly, announce the engagement
+of their daughter, Elizabeth, to Doctor Richard Livingstone."
+
+He sat for a long time staring at it.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Breaking Point, by Rinehart
+
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