11 files changed, 60387 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/1601-0.txt b/1601-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..115071a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,14130 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Breaking Point
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: September 21, 2008 [EBook #1601]
+Release Date: January, 1999
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+
+
+
+
+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 things.”
+
+“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 tie 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 him, 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+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 seem 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 Project Gutenberg's The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1601-0.txt or 1601-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/0/1601/
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
+Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
+of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/1601-0.zip b/1601-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4a4ce03
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601-0.zip
diff --git a/1601-h.zip b/1601-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c421114
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601-h.zip
diff --git a/1601-h/1601-h.htm b/1601-h/1601-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67a8caa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601-h/1601-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,17556 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Breaking Point
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Release Date: September 21, 2008 [EBook #1601]
+Last Updated: March 9, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE BREAKING POINT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#linkseventeen"> XVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> XIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> XXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> XXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> XXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> XXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> XXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> XXVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> XXVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> XXIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> XXX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> XXXI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> XXXII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> XXXIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> XXXIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> XXXV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> XXXVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> XXXVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> XXXVIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> XXXIX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> XL </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> XLI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> XLII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> XLIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> XLIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> XLV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0045"> XLVI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0046"> XLVII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0047"> XLVIII </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heaven and earth,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heaven and earth,&rdquo; sang the bass, Mr. Edwin Goodno, of the meat market
+      and the Boy Scouts. &ldquo;Heaven and earth, are full&mdash;&rdquo; His chin, large
+      and fleshy, buried itself deep; his eyes were glued on the music sheet in
+      his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are full, are full, are full,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Of the
+      majesty, of Thy glory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ready,&rdquo; barked the choir master. &ldquo;Full now, and all together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she sat in the choir room and awaited her turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Altos a little stronger, please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of the majesty, of the majesty, of the majesty, of Thy gl-o-o-ry,&rdquo; sang
+      Elizabeth. And was at once a nun and a principal in a sentimental dream of
+      two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mind going around the block?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;By Station Street?&rdquo;
+       There was something furtive and yet candid in her voice, and Elizabeth
+      glanced at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. But it's out of your way, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Station Street? Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think you could guess why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't know, then, do you? Sometimes I think every one must know. And
+      I don't care. I've reached that point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes I think he positively avoids me,&rdquo; Clare wailed. &ldquo;There's the
+      house, Elizabeth. Do you mind stopping a moment? He must be in his office
+      now. The light's burning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you wouldn't, Clare. He'd hate it if he knew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved on and Clare slowly followed her. The Rossiter girl's flow of
+      talk had suddenly stopped. She was thoughtful and impulsively suspicious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Elizabeth, I believe you care for him yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? What is the matter with you to-night, Clare?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm just thinking. Your voice was so queer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on in silence. The flow of Clare's confidences had ceased, and
+      her eyes were calculating and a trifle hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a good bit of talk about him,&rdquo; she jerked out finally. &ldquo;I suppose
+      you've heard it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of talk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, gossip. You'll hear it. Everybody's talking about it. It's doing him
+      a lot of harm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it,&rdquo; Elizabeth flared. &ldquo;This town hasn't anything else to
+      do, and so it talks. It makes me sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;talked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;The mind is its own place, and in
+      itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did a certain amount of serious reading every year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I'll be back for dinner,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Don't
+      look for me until you see me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mrs. Crosby, without taking her eyes from the sermon, would nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of late years, Doctor David Livingstone had been taking less and less of
+      the &ldquo;Don't-look-for-me-until-you-see-me&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had he been asked, suddenly, the name of the tall blonde girl who sang
+      among the sopranos, he could not have told it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;uncle,&rdquo; and as
+      David he now addressed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David,&rdquo; he said firmly.
+      &ldquo;Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I can trust old Nettie,&rdquo; he would say. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to sleep,&rdquo; he said comfortably. &ldquo;Get Wallie Sayre&mdash;I see
+      he's back from some place again&mdash;or ask a nice girl. Ask Elizabeth
+      Wheeler. I don't think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick stared into the windshield.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been wondering about that, David,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;just how much right&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Balderdash!&rdquo; David snorted. &ldquo;Don't get any fool notion in your head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking.
+      Finally he drew a long breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how about that golf&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of them back
+      you're lucky.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I ask only one thing, David,&rdquo; she had said. &ldquo;Tell me where the
+      things go. There wasn't a blanket for the guest-room bed at the time of
+      the Diocesan Convention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll run around to the Wheelers' and get them,&rdquo; Dick observed, in a
+      carefully casual voice. &ldquo;I'll see the Carter baby, too, David, and that
+      clears the afternoon. Any message?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give Elizabeth a kiss for me,&rdquo; he called over his shoulder, and went
+      chuckling up the path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper
+      course&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Minnie got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll unpin your veil for you,&rdquo; she offered, obligingly. &ldquo;You've got time
+      to lie down about ten minutes. Mrs. Morgan said she's got to have her ears
+      treated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope she doesn't sit and talk for an hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll talk, all right,&rdquo; Minnie observed, her mouth full of pins. &ldquo;She'd
+      be talking to me yet if I'd stood there. She's got her nerve, too, that
+      woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like to hear you speak so of the patients who come to the house,
+      Minnie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't like their asking me questions about the family either,&rdquo;
+       said Minnie, truculently. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Crosby stood very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think she should bring her questions to the family,&rdquo; she said, after a
+      silence. &ldquo;Thank you, Minnie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And David was so sure! So sure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped rocking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;David!&rdquo; she called sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened the door and came in, a bulky figure, still faintly aromatic of
+      drugs, cheerful and serene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'you call me?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Shut the door and come in. I want to talk to you.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;All right, my dear. Let's have it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Mrs. Morgan have anything to say?&rdquo; He stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She usually has,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I never knew you considered it worth
+      repeating. No. Nothing in particular.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to talk to you about Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he's in love, David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David's heavy body straightened, but his face remained serene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had to expect that, Lucy. Is it Elizabeth Wheeler, do you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a good girl, Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not the point, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think she cares for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. There's some talk of Wallie Sayre. He's there a good bit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wallie Sayre!&rdquo; snorted David. &ldquo;He's never done a day's work in his life
+      and never will.&rdquo; He reflected on that with growing indignation. &ldquo;He
+      doesn't hold a candle to Dick. Of course, if the girl's a fool&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hands thrust deep into his pockets David took a turn about the room. Lucy
+      watched him. At last:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're evading the real issue, David, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I am,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;I'd better talk to him. I think he's got an
+      idea he shouldn't marry. That's nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mean that, exactly,&rdquo; Lucy persisted. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the ruddy color left David's face. He stood still, staring at her
+      and silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he does go back&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Donaldson is dead,&rdquo; David broke in, almost roughly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maggie Donaldson is still living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is one thing, David, I ought to know. What has become of the
+      Carlysle girl?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She left the stage. There was a sort of general conviction she was
+      implicated and&mdash;I don't know, Lucy. Sometimes I think she was.&rdquo; He
+      sighed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He turned on her. &ldquo;Don't get that in your head with the rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder, sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dinner time, Caruso,&rdquo; she said absently. Caruso was the name Dick had
+      given the bird. And to David: &ldquo;She must be in her thirties now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably.&rdquo; Then his anger and anxiety burst out. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smell's like chicken, Minnie,&rdquo; he said, into the dining room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hi, up there!&rdquo; he called lustily. &ldquo;Come and feed a starving man. I'm
+      going to muffle the door-bell!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the language of our great ally,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Madame et Monsieur, le
+      diner est servi.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;well, to inspire what he
+      wanted to inspire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get the clubs?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick looked almost stricken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgot them, David,&rdquo; he said guiltily. &ldquo;Jim Wheeler went out to look
+      them up, and I&mdash;I'll go back after dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate and
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David. I've asked
+      Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the baby at the Homer place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office,
+      anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to see, Dick?&rdquo; Mrs. Crosby asked. &ldquo;Will you have some
+      dumplings?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But David did not look up from his plate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;to keep them safe and
+      happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;trophies
+      of the gayety and conquest which were her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Nina had &ldquo;come out.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to tell you
+      all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He's not a boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has that
+      occurred to either of you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;! We'd better have a dinner or something,
+      mother, and announce it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like this, daddy,&rdquo; she would say. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where's your trousseau?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your
+      mother and I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more
+      friend of mine is married&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and thoughtfully.
+      And tearing it off would say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when the
+      time comes and you have no gift from us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth.
+      Particularly to Elizabeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in arms at once a night or two before Dick had invited Elizabeth to
+      go to the theater when Margaret Wheeler said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house was gayer when Nina was at home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;my
+      cigars&mdash;and cigarettes over everything, and more infernal spooning
+      going on than I've ever seen in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had resumed his newspaper, to put it down almost at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that Sayre boy hanging around for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he's in love with her, Walter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;well,
+      he's an heir. That's why he was begotten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret Wheeler stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Walter!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He's a nice boy, and he's a gentleman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walter, have you ever thought there was anything queer about Dick
+      Livingstone's coming here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darned good for the town that he did come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;nobody ever dreamed that David and Lucy had a nephew. Then he
+      turns up, and they send him to medical college, and all that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got some relations I haven't notified the town I possess,&rdquo; he said
+      grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there's something odd. I don't believe Henry Livingstone, the
+      Wyoming brother, ever had a son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What possible foundation have you for a statement like that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And trust the Morgan woman to spread the good news,&rdquo; he said with angry
+      sarcasm. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were very particular about Wallie Sayre's heredity, Walter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's different,&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and whistled for the dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to take a walk,&rdquo; he said briefly, and went out. He always took
+      a walk when things disturbed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some man,&rdquo;
+       Nina had said once, rather flippantly, &ldquo;and never know she was
+      shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady&mdash;and
+      serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized
+      dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she
+      was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to &ldquo;do something.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what do you think of doing?&rdquo; he had inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it,&rdquo; she had said despondently. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to,&rdquo; he had observed, dryly.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hoped he did not think she was only a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on Elizabeth's bed with a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I really don't know what to do with father,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can give you ten.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, ask mother for the rest, won't you? You needn't say it's for me.
+      I'll give it to you Tuesday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not going to mother, Nina. She has had a lot of expenses this month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I'll borrow it from Wallie Sayre,&rdquo; Nina said, accepting her defeat
+      cheerfully. &ldquo;If it was an ordinary bill it could wait, but I lost it at
+      bridge last night and it's got to be paid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You oughtn't to play bridge for money,&rdquo; Elizabeth said, a bit primly.
+      &ldquo;And if Leslie knew you borrowed from Wallace Sayre&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgot! Wallie's downstairs, Elizabeth. Really, if he wasn't so funny,
+      he'd be tragic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why tragic? He has everything in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you use a little bit of sense, you can have it too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+    &ldquo;I don't want things.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Getting no
+      response from Elizabeth, she went on: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be nice to him, anyhow,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth looked around her virginal little room, with its painted
+      dressing table, its chintz, and its white bed with the blue dress on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very well satisfied as I am,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While she smoothed her hair before the mirror Nina surveyed the room and
+      her eyes lighted on the frock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you still wearing that shabby old thing?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;I do wish
+      you'd get some proper clothes. Are you going somewhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to the theater on Wednesday night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who with?&rdquo; Nina in her family was highly colloquial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With Doctor Livingstone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you joking?&rdquo; Nina demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Joking? Of course not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina sat down again on the bed, her eyes on her sister, curious and not a
+      little apprehensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the first time it's ever happened, to my knowledge,&rdquo; she declared.
+      &ldquo;I know he's avoided me like poison. I thought he hated women. You know
+      Clare Rossiter is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth turned suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clare is ridiculous,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina raised her carefully plucked eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You needn't jump down my throat, you know.&rdquo; She
+      considered, her eyes on her sister. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to hear it, if you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went to the door and opened it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; she added as a parting shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wallie Sayre rose from a deep chair as she entered the living-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I was on the point of asking Central to give me this
+      number so I could get you on the upstairs telephone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nina and I were talking. I'm sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nina coming down?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose so. Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You couldn't pass the word along that you are going to be engaged for the
+      next half hour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might, but I certainly don't intend to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are as hard to isolate as a&mdash;as a germ,&rdquo; he complained. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're seeing me alone now, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he leaned over and catching up her hand, kissed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're so cool and sweet,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&mdash;I wish you liked me a
+      little.&rdquo; He smiled up at her, rather wistfully. &ldquo;I never knew any one
+      quite like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are plenty like me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Don't be silly, Wallie. I hate
+      having my hand kissed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; he observed shrewdly, &ldquo;whether that's really true, or whether
+      you just hate having me do it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Nina came in he was drawing a rough sketch of his new power boat,
+      being built in Florida.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put in a word for me, Nina,&rdquo; Wallie begged. &ldquo;I intend to ask Elizabeth to
+      go to the theater this week, and I think she is going to refuse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the play?&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'The Valley.' Not that the play matters. It's Beverly Carlysle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought she was dead, or something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry. I'm going Wednesday night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked downcast over that, and he was curious, too. But he made no
+      comment save:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, better luck next time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just imagine,&rdquo; said Nina. &ldquo;She's going with Dick Livingstone. Can you
+      imagine it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's not a bit attractive,&rdquo; Nina was saying. &ldquo;Quiet, and&mdash;well, I
+      don't suppose he knows what he's got on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wallie was watching Elizabeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I don't know,&rdquo; he said, with masculine fairness. &ldquo;He's a good sort,
+      and he's pretty much of a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was quite sure that the look Elizabeth gave him was grateful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a wonder, they say,&rdquo; he said from the doorway. &ldquo;Take two hankies
+      along, for it's got more tears than 'East Lynne' and 'The Old Homestead'
+      put together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the dusky living-room Nina was speaking her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You treat him like a dog,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, I know you're civil to him, but
+      if any man looked at me the way Wallie looks at you&mdash;I don't know,
+      though,&rdquo; she added, thoughtfully. &ldquo;It may be that that is why he is so
+      keen. It may be good tactics. Most girls fall for him with a crash.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;To Doctor David, with love and a merry
+      Xmas, from Angeline Morgan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and
+      reluctant&mdash;to make out his bills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David went to the bookcase and got down a large book, much worn, and
+      carried it to his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You drink this and come to bed, David,&rdquo; she said peremptorily. &ldquo;I've been
+      lying upstairs waiting for you to come up, and I need some sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no sort of hope that she would not notice the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I just got to thinking things over, Lucy,&rdquo; he explained, his tone
+      apologetic. &ldquo;There's no use pretending I'm not worried. I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it's in God's hands,&rdquo; she said, quite simply. &ldquo;Take this up and
+      drink it slowly. If you gulp it down it makes a lump in your stomach.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better take the milk yourself, Lucy,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You're not sleeping
+      either.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had some. Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beverly Carlysle,&rdquo; commented the night editor. &ldquo;Back with bells on!&rdquo; He
+      took up the photograph. &ldquo;Doesn't look much older, does she? It's a queer
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louis Bassett, star reporter and feature writer of the Times-Republican,
+      smiled reminiscently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was a wonder,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fell for her, did you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did I? That was ten years ago, and I'm not sure I'm over it yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably that's the reason,&rdquo; said the city editor, drily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He finished his coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You might ask, too, what she thinks has become of Judson Clark,&rdquo; he
+      added. &ldquo;I have an idea she knows, if any one does.&rdquo; Bassett stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're joking, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But it would make a darned good story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Along the other lay David.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;some
+      young whipper-snapper&rdquo; was another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've delivered about half the population of this town,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+      slapped 'em to make 'em breathe with my own bare hands. And I'm still here
+      and so are they.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not his life. Hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mind began to turn on the possibility of keeping him away from Norada.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put on your things,&rdquo; he said gayly, &ldquo;and we'll take a ride on the
+      hill-tops. I've arranged for a moon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And when she hesitated:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It makes you sleep, you know. I'm going, if I have to ride alone and talk
+      to an imaginary lady beside me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look happy, Dick,&rdquo; she said wistfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am happy, Aunt Lucy,&rdquo; he replied, and bending over, kissed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Wednesday he was in a state of alternating high spirits and periods of
+      silence. Even Minnie noticed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Dick's that queer I hardly know how to take him.&rdquo; she said to Lucy.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said, standing before her, &ldquo;how's this? Art can do no more,
+      Mrs. Crosby.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll brush your back,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;There, that's better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you think Uncle David is?&rdquo; he asked, unexpectedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better than he has been in years. Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I'm thinking of taking a little trip. Only ten days,&rdquo; he added,
+      seeing her face. &ldquo;You could house-clean my office while I'm away. You know
+      you've been wanting to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dropped the brush, and he stooped to pick it up. That gave her a
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Where?&rdquo; she managed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Dry River, by way of Norada.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should you go back there?&rdquo; she asked, in a carefully suppressed
+      voice. &ldquo;Why don't you go East? You've wanted to go back to Johns Hopkins
+      for months?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the other hand, why shouldn't I go back to Norada?&rdquo; he asked, with an
+      affectation of lightness. Then he put his hand on her shoulders. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are free.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got to know,&rdquo; he said, almost doggedly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's not at the ranch. Her husband died, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have an idea I can find her,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll make a good try, anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had gone she got her salts bottle and lay down on her bed. Her
+      heart was hammering wildly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;Heaven save the mark!&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The small man was answering a question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather on the contrary, I should say. The stronger the character the
+      greater the smash.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David pondered this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've read all you've written on the subject,&rdquo; he said finally.
+      &ldquo;Especially since the war.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The psycho-analyst put his finger tips together, judicially. &ldquo;Yes. The war
+      bore me out,&rdquo; he observed with a certain complacence. &ldquo;It added a great
+      deal to our literature, too, although some of the positions are not well
+      taken. Van Alston, for instance&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have said, I think, that every man has a breaking point.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;was there
+      such a history in this case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; Doctor David's voice was reluctant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The mind is a strange thing,&rdquo; went on the little man, musingly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; David said unhappily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The walling off, you say, followed a shock?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shock and serious illness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there fear with the shock?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David hesitated. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said finally. &ldquo;Very great fear, I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Lauler glanced quickly at David and then looked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he nodded. &ldquo;Of course the walling off of a part of the past&mdash;you
+      said a part&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Practically all of it. I'll tell you about that later. What about the
+      walling off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been studying it for ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ten years! Do you mean that this condition has persisted for ten years?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David moistened his dry lips. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he admitted. &ldquo;It might not have done
+      so, but the&mdash;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,&mdash;well, the patient
+      adapted them to fit what he was told.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Doctor Lauler shot a swift glance at David, and looked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An interesting experiment,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;It must have taken courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A justifiable experiment,&rdquo; David affirmed stoutly. &ldquo;And it took courage.
+      Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David got up and reached for his hat. Then he braced himself for the real
+      purpose of his visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I have been wondering about,&rdquo; he said, very carefully, &ldquo;is this:
+      this mechanism of fear, this wall&mdash;how strong is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like a dam, I take it. It holds back certain memories, like a
+      floodgate. Is anything likely to break it down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me know if I can be of any further assistance, Doctor,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And
+      I'll be glad to see your patient at any time. I'd like the record for my
+      files.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; David said. He stood fingering his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose there's nothing to do? The dam will either break, or it won't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside, in the corridor, David remembered to put on his hat. Happiness
+      and a normal occupation, yes. But no shock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across from the station was a large billboard, and on it the name of
+      Beverly Carlysle and her play, &ldquo;The Valley.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had brought in her sewing, and David pretended to read. Now and then
+      he looked at his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick was whistling on the kitchen porch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going like a house afire,&rdquo; he said, as the curtain fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;She's the best there is,&rdquo; was his comment. He
+      hesitated, then added: &ldquo;She's my sister, you know. Naturally, for business
+      reasons, I don't publish the relationship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett glanced at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That so? Well, I'm glad she decided to come back. She's too good to
+      bury.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This whole tour has been a triumph. She's the best there is,&rdquo; Gregory
+      repeated, &ldquo;and they know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does she know it?&rdquo; Bassett inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She doesn't throw any temperament, if that's what you mean. She&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time Gregory straightened and moistened his dry lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a man sitting down there&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never saw him before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, still curious and extremely interested, he walked briskly around to
+      the stage entrance, nodded to the doorkeeper, and went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gregory was not in sight, but the stage manager was there, directing the
+      striking of the last set.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm waiting for Gregory,&rdquo; Bassett said. &ldquo;Hasn't fainted, has he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d'you mean, fainted?&rdquo; inquired the stage manager, with a touch of
+      hostility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was with him when he thought he recognized somebody. You know who. You
+      can tell him I got his automobile number.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stage manager's hostility faded, and he fell into the trap. &ldquo;You know
+      about it, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was with him when he saw him. Unfortunately I couldn't help him out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;I knew him, you know&mdash;I
+      don't think even he would have the courage to come here and sit through a
+      performance. Although,&rdquo; he added reflectively, &ldquo;Jud Clark had the nerve
+      for anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett ran over the situation in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Motive, motive, that was the word. What motive lay behind action.
+      Conscious and unconscious, every volitional act was the result of motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wondered what she had done when Gregory had told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It went all right, I think, Fred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said absently. &ldquo;Go on out, Alice. I'll let you come back in a
+      few minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited until the door closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter?&rdquo; she asked rather indifferently. &ldquo;If it's more
+      quarreling in the company I don't want to hear it. I'm tired.&rdquo; Then she
+      took a full look at him, and sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fred! What is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave her the truth, brutally and at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think Judson Clark was in the house to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither would I, if somebody told me,&rdquo; he agreed sullenly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You called Saunders!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? I tell you, Bev, I was nearly crazy. I'm nearly crazy now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did Saunders say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he didn't know Clark was dead, he'd say it was Clark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said sulkily. &ldquo;He was with a girl. He was dressed all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't say anything, except to Saunders?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No I'm not crazy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd better see Joe,&rdquo; she reflected. &ldquo;Go and get him, Fred. And tell Alice
+      she needn't wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Saunders!&rdquo; he said chokingly, &ldquo;Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it
+      away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican,&rdquo; he managed to say. &ldquo;Do you&mdash;do
+      you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile number. He
+      said so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up at her, his face twitching. &ldquo;They're hound dogs on a scent,
+      Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo; He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand.
+      &ldquo;Poor old Bev!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;After the way you've come back, too. It's a
+      damned shame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd better make sure that was Jud first,&rdquo; he offered, after a time, &ldquo;and
+      then warn him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bassett will be after him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; she commanded sharply. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the staircase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Lucy!&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Dick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time to
+      press my blue trousers this morning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just throw them down, Doctor Dick,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I've got an iron hot now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day, Minnie,&rdquo; he announced, &ldquo;you will wear a halo and with the
+      angels sing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not eat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two names on your sign, I see. Father and son, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think you'd be in the city. Limitations to this sort of thing,
+      aren't there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it,&rdquo; said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Patients are your friends, of course. Born and raised here, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not exactly. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. My father had a ranch
+      out there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wyoming!&rdquo; the reporter commented. &ldquo;That's a long way from here. Anywhere
+      near the new oil fields?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not far from Norada. That's the oil center,&rdquo; Dick offered,
+      good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. &ldquo;If those
+      headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Norada?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;That's where the big Clark ranch was located, wasn't
+      it? Ever happen to meet Judson Clark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our place was very isolated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better drink considerable water when you take that stuff. Some stomachs
+      don't tolerate it very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The door closed. The reporter stood in the waiting-room for a moment. Then
+      he clapped on his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm a damned fool,&rdquo; he muttered, and went out into the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made his way, head bent, toward the station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A doctor. A pill shooter. Jud Clark!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had, for instance, mentioned Clare Rossiter, very casually. Oh very,
+      very casually. And he had said: &ldquo;Clare Rossiter? Oh, yes, the tall blonde
+      girl, isn't she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Rome&rdquo; with an air of determined concentration, and wearing her best
+      summer frock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not intend to depend purely on Gibbon's &ldquo;Rome,&rdquo; evidently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you expecting any one, Elizabeth?&rdquo; 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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one in particular.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;I think I see
+      him coming now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Mrs. Sayre, Wednesday, May
+      fifteenth, luncheon at one-thirty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came, you see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I intended to wait until to-morrow, but I had
+      a little time. But if you're doing anything&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was reading Gibbon's 'Rome,'&rdquo; she informed him. &ldquo;I think every one
+      should know it. Don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens, what for?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know.&rdquo; They looked at each other, and suddenly they laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to improve my mind,&rdquo; she explained. &ldquo;I felt, last night, that
+      you&mdash;that you know so many things, and that I was frightfully stupid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to say,&rdquo; he asked, aghast, &ldquo;that I&mdash;! Great Scott!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Settled in the living-room, they got back rather quickly to their status
+      of the night before, and he was moved to confession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't really intend to wait until to-morrow,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have indeed. It's a wonderful tie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neat but not gaudy, eh?&rdquo; He grinned at her, happily. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, out of a clear sky, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I may be going away before long, Elizabeth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't mean-not to stay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I want to go back to Wyoming. Where I was born. Only for a few
+      weeks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in that &ldquo;only for a few weeks&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only for a few weeks,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;I thought perhaps, if you wouldn't
+      mind my writing to you, now and then&mdash;I write a rotten hand, you
+      know. Most medical men do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like it very much,&rdquo; she said, primly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may never come back,&rdquo; she said, casually. &ldquo;After all, you were born
+      there, and we must seem very quiet to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quiet!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;You are heavenly restful and comforting. You&mdash;&rdquo;
+       he checked himself and got up. &ldquo;Then I'm to write, and you are to make out
+      as much of my scrawl as you can and answer. Is that right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll write you all the town gossip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you do&mdash;!&rdquo; he threatened her. &ldquo;You're to write me what you're
+      doing, and all about yourself. Remember, I'll be counting on you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got back to the office at half past six to find a red-eyed Minnie in
+      the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost immediately, however, the doorbell rang, and a moment later Minnie
+      opened his door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gentleman to see you, Doctor David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up clumsily and settled his collar. Then he opened the door into
+      his waiting-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; he said resignedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;the
+      Happy Valley company&mdash;but he was a younger man. I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David stiffened, but he surveyed his visitor impassively from under his
+      shaggy white eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't been in a theater for a dozen years, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are two names on your sign. The other one, was he by any chance at
+      the theater last night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I shall have to have a reason for these inquiries,&rdquo; David said
+      slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was trying to place Gregory, to fit him into the situation; straining
+      back over ten years of security, racking his memory, without result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what have you come to find out?&rdquo; he asked, as Gregory turned and
+      looked around the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other Doctor Livingstone is your brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My nephew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry to trouble you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I suppose I've made a mistake. I&mdash;is
+      your nephew at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I see a picture of him, if you have one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless I know why you want to see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is tall, rather spare? And he took a young lady to the theater last
+      night?&rdquo; Gregory persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He answers that description. What of it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he is your nephew?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My brother's son,&rdquo; David said steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; he said, relaxing somewhat. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Gregory did not sit down. He stood where he was, and continued to eye
+      David intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know just what it conveys to you, Doctor, but I am Beverly
+      Carlysle's brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David lowered himself into his chair. His knees were suddenly weak under
+      him. But he was able to control his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. And waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Maybe this will help
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, significantly. &ldquo;It does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He placed the photograph on the desk, and sitting down, drew his chair
+      close to David's. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David nodded. &ldquo;Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor David listened stonily. Gregory lowered his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean, then, that there is danger of such a revival?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think there is,&rdquo; Gregory said bitterly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David heard him clearly, but as though from a great distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When David said nothing, but sat holding tight to the arms of his old
+      chair, Gregory reached for his hat and got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing for him to do,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;he took your nephew's automobile
+      license number.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still David sat silent, and Gregory moved to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get him away, to-night if you can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; David said. His voice was thick. &ldquo;I appreciate your coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up dizzily, as Gregory said, &ldquo;Good-evening&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the outer door closed David fell to the floor with a crash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The house door opened, and Gregory came out, turning toward the station.
+      Bassett caught up with him and put a hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said cheerfully. &ldquo;It was, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gregory stopped dead and stared at him. Then:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old dog Tray!&rdquo; he said sneeringly. &ldquo;If your brain was as good as your
+      nose, Bassett, you'd be a whale of a newspaper man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't bother about my brain. It's working fine to-day, anyhow. Well, what
+      had he to say for himself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gregory's mind was busy, and he had had a moment to pull himself together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We both get off together,&rdquo; he said, more amiably. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see them both?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that's that. He certainly looked like Clark to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll say he did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather surprised him, didn't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, he was all right,&rdquo; Gregory said. &ldquo;I didn't tell him anything, of
+      course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett looked at his watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was after you, all right,&rdquo; he said, cheerfully. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he finished amiably. &ldquo;There's no
+      train until seven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Gregory refused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks. I'll wander on down to the station and get a paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reporter smiled. Gregory was holding a grudge against him, for a bad
+      night and a bad day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said affably. &ldquo;I'll see you at the train. I'll walk about
+      a bit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take you anywhere?&rdquo; Dick asked. &ldquo;How's the headache?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better, thanks.&rdquo; Bassett stared at him. &ldquo;No, I'm just walking around
+      until train-time. Are you starting out or going home, at this hour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Going home. Well, glad the head's better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove on, leaving the reporter gazing after him. So Gregory had been
+      lying. He hadn't seen this chap at all. Then why&mdash;? 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Richard Livingstone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't see him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's important.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you can't see him. Doctor David has just had a stroke. He's in the
+      office now, on the floor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The big smash did not come until the middle of October.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A queer picture, he reflected, the three of them shut away on the great
+      ranch, and every day some new tension, some new strain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett closed his notebook and lighted a cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the second page, however, he stopped, coffee cup in air. &ldquo;Is Judson
+      Clark alive? Wife of former ranch manager makes confession.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 tie up with a girl, that was on Clark's
+      conscience, not his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was vaguely uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a queer world, Joe,&rdquo; he observed to the waiter, who had come in for
+      the breakfast dishes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. It is that,&rdquo; said Joe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to forget what?&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;To forget what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had plenty to forget,&rdquo; David would say, stolidly. &ldquo;I think this man's
+      a fool, but at that&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be a fool,&rdquo; David had said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I feel,&rdquo; he had replied, &ldquo;is this: I don't know, of course, if she
+      cares.&rdquo; David had grunted. &ldquo;I do know I'm going to try to make her care,
+      if it&mdash;if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch
+      again, David, before things go any further.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You let well enough alone, Dick,&rdquo; he had finished. &ldquo;You've got everything
+      you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about. When people
+      want him they want him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;John Donaldson, he learned, was
+      his name&mdash;was Maggie's husband, and every so often he came, about
+      dawn, and brought food and supplies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just remember, they're only acting,&rdquo; he had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But life does do things like that to people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on
+      the carpet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is tragedy, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Don't ring. Walk in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;poor Dick!&mdash;could never be
+      cleaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had time to think things over, Dick. I haven't been fair to you.
+      You're thrown away here. Besides&mdash;&rdquo; he hesitated. Then: &ldquo;We might as
+      well face it. The day of the general practitioner has gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it,&rdquo; Dick said stoutly. &ldquo;Maybe we are only signposts to
+      point the way to the other fellows, but the world will always need
+      signposts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I've been thinking of,&rdquo; David pursued his own train of thought, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call the nurse, Aunt Lucy,&rdquo; said Dick. &ldquo;He's raving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; David retorted testily. &ldquo;I've told you. This whole town only
+      comes here now to be told what specialist to go to, and you know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know anything of the sort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't, it's because you won't face the facts.&rdquo; Dick chuckled, and
+      threw an arm over David's shoulder, &ldquo;You old hypocrite!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You're
+      trying to get rid of me, for some reason. Don't tell me you're going to
+      get married!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to let him get rid of me like this, Aunt Lucy?&rdquo; he
+      demanded. &ldquo;Sentenced to Johns Hopkins, like Napoleon to St. Helena! Are
+      you with me, or forninst me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know, Dick,&rdquo; she said, with her eyes on David. &ldquo;If it's for your
+      good&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no reason, of course. If she'll have you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that. I know that whether she will or not is a pretty vital
+      matter to me, David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David nodded, silently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now you want me to go away. To leave her. You're rather urgent about
+      it. And I feel&mdash;well I begin to think you have a reason for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David clenched his hands under the bed-clothing, but he returned Dick's
+      gaze steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a good girl,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But she's entitled to more than you can
+      give her, the way things are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is presupposing that she cares for me. I haven't an idea that she
+      does. That she may, in time&mdash;Then, that's the reason for this Johns
+      Hopkins thing, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's the reason,&rdquo; David said stoutly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another line of
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you understand,&rdquo; he observed, after a renewal of his restless
+      pacing, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be a fool,&rdquo; David said querulously. &ldquo;You'll set a lot of women
+      cackling, and what they don't know they'll invent. I know 'em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only herself and her family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because they have a right to know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the
+      subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not do it until we've gone into it together,&rdquo; he promised. &ldquo;There's
+      plenty of time. You settle down now and get ready for sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the nurse came in at eleven o'clock she found Dick gone and David,
+      very still, with his face to the wall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Oh, the tall blonde girl?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once or twice, too, she had found Clare's eyes on her, and they were
+      hostile eyes. It was almost as though they said: &ldquo;I hate you because you
+      know. But don't dare to pity me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth had waited up for him one night, only a short time before, and
+      beckoning him into her room, had talked to him severely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to be ashamed, Jim,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You're simply worrying mother
+      sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, why?&rdquo; he demanded defiantly. &ldquo;I'm old enough to take care of
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to be taking care of her, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had looked rather crestfallen at that, and before he went out he
+      offered a half-sheepish explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd tell them where I go,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you go from there?&rdquo; she persisted inexorably. &ldquo;It's half past
+      one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt rather helpless, because she knew he was right from his own
+      standpoint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. I'm surprised at Les, Jim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Les! He just trailed along. He's all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless she found it hard to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to keep you, if you're busy,&rdquo; she said, avoiding his eyes.
+      &ldquo;If you are in a hurry&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my business,&rdquo; he said patiently. And waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if you are going to understand me, when I do begin?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sound alarmingly ominous.&rdquo; He smiled at her, and she had a moment of
+      panic. &ldquo;You don't look like a young lady with anything eating at her
+      damask cheek, or however it goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Livingstone,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;people are saying something
+      about you that you ought to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her, amazed and incredulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About me? What can they say? That's absurd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt you ought to know. Of course I don't believe it. Not for a moment.
+      But you know what this town is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it's a very good town,&rdquo; he said steadily. &ldquo;However, let's have it.
+      I daresay it is not very serious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you ought to know,&rdquo; she justified herself, nervously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I ought to know, of course. Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;David, David!&rdquo; he thought. &ldquo;Why did you do it? And what am I? And who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dick!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;Is anything wrong?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a headache,&rdquo; he said. He looked at his watch and got up. &ldquo;I'll
+      take a look at David, and then we'll have dinner. I didn't know it was so
+      late.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think we'd better have a talk?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about?&rdquo; she asked, with her heart hammering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About me.&rdquo; He stood above her, and looked down, still with the tenderness
+      with which he always regarded her, but with resolution in his very
+      attitude. &ldquo;First of all, I'll tell you something. Then I'll ask you to
+      tell me all you can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She yearned over him as he told her, for all her terror. His voice, for
+      all its steadiness, was strained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have felt for some time,&rdquo; he finished, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dick! Dick!&rdquo; was all she could say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was about,&rdquo; he went on, with his almost terrible steadiness, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a despairing gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know which?&rdquo; he persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you have the unbelievable cruelty not to tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got up, a taut little figure with a dignity born of her fear and of
+      her love for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall not betray David's confidence,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew her determination and her obstinate loyalty. But he was fairly
+      desperate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know that if you don't tell me, I shall go to David?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you go now you will kill him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's as bad as that, is it?&rdquo; he asked grimly. &ldquo;Then there is something
+      shameful behind it, is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice broke and she turned to go out, her chin quivering, but half way
+      to the door he called to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Lucy&mdash;&rdquo; he said gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard him behind her, felt his strong arms as he turned her about. He
+      drew her to him and stooping, kissed her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He kissed her again and let her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope your food is to your taste, Doctor David,&rdquo; he said, in a high
+      falsetto which set the nurse giggling in the hall. &ldquo;I may not be much of a
+      nurse, but I can cook.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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'.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;The Valley&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      JUST how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the star
+      of &ldquo;The Valley&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way, I saw you in Haverly yesterday afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must have seen somebody else. Haverly? Where's Haverly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funny,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Chap looked like you. Maybe a little heavier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For chicken and waffles, Les,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It will be oceans of fun. And
+      I've promised the cocktails.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm tired,&rdquo; he replied, sulkily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, if that's the way you feel!&rdquo; Nina said, and hung up the receiver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;The Valley&rdquo; had only four more before it moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she say I am expected there?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She ordered dinner for you here, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anybody sick?&rdquo; Leslie asked, his feeling of apprehension growing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nina is having hysterics upstairs,&rdquo; Mr. Wheeler said, and continued his
+      pacing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nina! Hysterics?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I said,&rdquo; replied Mr. Wheeler, suddenly savage. &ldquo;You've made a
+      nice mess of things, haven't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leslie placed the box of orchids on the table and drew off his gloves. His
+      mind was running over many possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better tell me about it, hadn't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;as&rdquo;&mdash;he looked about&mdash;&ldquo;as that poker has. But that's
+      the worst you can say of her. As to you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Wheeler's anxiety was greater than his anger. He lowered his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She got a bill to-day for two or three boxes of flowers, sent to some
+      actress.&rdquo; And when Leslie said nothing, &ldquo;I'm not condoning it, mind you.
+      You'd no business to do it. But,&rdquo; he added fretfully, &ldquo;why the devil, if
+      you've got to act the fool, don't you have your bills sent to your
+      office?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I don't need to tell you that's all there was to it? Flowers, I
+      mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm taking that for granted. But she says she won't go back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Hello,
+      Les,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's told you about it, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think she'll go back home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She promised she would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was going to talk to you about something else,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but this is
+      hardly the time. I'll get on home.&rdquo; He rose. &ldquo;She'll be all right. Only
+      I'd advise very tactful handling and&mdash;the fullest explanation you can
+      make.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? I'd be glad to have something to keep my mind occupied. It's
+      eating itself up just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a personal matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ward glanced up at him quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you happened to hear a story that I believe is going round? One that
+      concerns me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I have,&rdquo; Leslie admitted. &ldquo;I didn't pay much attention. Nobody is
+      taking it very seriously.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not the point,&rdquo; Dick persisted. &ldquo;I don't mind idle gossip. I don't
+      give a damn about it. It's the statement itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should say that you are the only person who knows anything about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick made a restless, impatient gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know one thing more,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Nina told you, I suppose. Does&mdash;I
+      suppose Elizabeth knows it, too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I rather think she does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The next time you're out of a cook just send for me,&rdquo; he said cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wheeler, full and overflowing with indignation and the piece of her
+      mind she had meant to deliver, retired vanquished to her bedroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sitting and thinking, or just sitting?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Air-castles, eh? Well, be sure you put the right man into them!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I mean is,&rdquo; he added hastily, &ldquo;don't be a fool and take Wallie
+      Sayre. Take a man, while you're about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would, if I could do the taking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's piffle, Elizabeth.&rdquo; He sat down on the arm of a chair and looked
+      at her. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it's true, and it wouldn't matter to me, anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good for you,&rdquo; he said heartily, and got up. &ldquo;You'd better go to bed,
+      young lady. It's almost midnight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But although she rose she made no further move to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I am worrying about is this, Leslie. He may hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has heard it, honey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had expected her to look alarmed, but instead she showed relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tell you the truth, Les,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She stopped and looked up at him to
+      see if he understood, and he nodded gravely. &ldquo;Then to-day, when he came to
+      see Nina, he avoided me. He&mdash;I was waiting in the hall upstairs, and
+      he just said a word or two and went on down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo; Leslie said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, dear,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Railroad been here long?&rdquo; he asked the conductor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Norada must have been pretty isolated before that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thirty miles in a coach or a Ford car.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was reading the other day,&rdquo; said Bassett, &ldquo;about the Judson Clark case.
+      Have a cigar? Got time to sit down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You a newspaper man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oil well supplies,&rdquo; said Bassett easily. &ldquo;Well, in this article it seemed
+      some woman or other had made a confession. It sounded fishy to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'll tell you about that.&rdquo; The conductor sat down and bit off the
+      end of his cigar. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That rather sounds as though the story is true, doesn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they found the cabin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure they did,&rdquo; said the conductor equably. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;gone off her head.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been here long?&rdquo; he asked the clerk at the desk, after a leisurely meal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clerk grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must have written that down and learned it off,&rdquo; Bassett said admiringly.
+      &ldquo;What the devil's the Clark place? And why should I go there? Unless,&rdquo; he
+      added, &ldquo;they serve a decent meal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry.&rdquo; The clerk looked at him sharply, was satisfied, and picked up a
+      pen. &ldquo;You'll hear the story if you stay around here any time. Anything I
+      can do for you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Fire the cook,&rdquo; Bassett said, and moved away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ever hear of any Livingstones in these parts?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes. There used to be a Livingstone ranch at Dry River,&rdquo; she said,
+      pausing with her carpet sweeper, and looking at him. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd be a millionaire now if I'd held on,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd just like to say one thing,&rdquo; the owner said, as he tried the gears.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to Dry River,&rdquo; Bassett said shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dry River's right, if you're looking for oil! Go easy on the brakes, old
+      man. We need 'em in our business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His brother from the East inherited it,&rdquo; said the storekeeper. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The brother inherited it, eh? Do you know the brother's name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;David, I think. He was a doctor back East somewhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then this Henry Livingstone wasn't married? Or at least had no children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He
+      glanced at Bassett shrewdly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Henry Livingstone!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;David&rdquo; and he had come out, too
+      late for the funeral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember when that was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long did 'David' stay?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She glanced at the clock. &ldquo;My husband will
+      be in soon for dinner. I'd be glad to have you stay and take a meal with
+      us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reporter thanked her and declined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an interesting story,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose and threw away his cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say this David went East, when he had sold out the place. Do you
+      remember where he lived?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some town in eastern Pennsylvania. I've forgotten the name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got to be sure I'm wrong, and then go ahead,&rdquo; he said, as he got his
+      hat. &ldquo;I'll see those men at the ranch, I guess, and then be on my way. How
+      far is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is anything wrong?&rdquo; he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I want to know, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he found himself violently angry. Not at her, of course. At
+      everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wrong?&rdquo; he said, savagely. &ldquo;Yes. Everything is wrong!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he was angry! She went rather pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I done, Dick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed. Startled,
+      too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What have you done? You're the only thing that's right in
+      a wrong world. You&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked himself, put down his bag&mdash;he had just come in&mdash;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&mdash;which shows how
+      strange the English language is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elizabeth,&rdquo; he said gravely. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think it's possible that I know what it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is always gossip,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and the only thing one can do is to
+      forget it at once. You ought to be too big for that sort of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;suppose it is true?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What difference would it make?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a quick movement toward her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There may be more than that. I don't know, Elizabeth,&rdquo; he said, his eyes
+      on hers. &ldquo;I have always thought&mdash;I can't go to David now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to know this, Dick,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That nothing, no gossip or
+      anything, can make any difference to me. And I've been terribly hurt.
+      We've been such friends. You&mdash;I've been lying awake at night,
+      worrying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're all I've got,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The one real thing in a world that's
+      going to smash. I think I love you more than God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day he
+      felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican&mdash;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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What fol-de-rol is all this?&rdquo; David demanded fiercely, with a childish
+      look of expectation in his eyes. &ldquo;Give me that box. Some more slippers,
+      probably!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It
+      was a cigar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I told her you wanted to see
+      her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry her&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, why shouldn't he?&rdquo; he demanded truculently. &ldquo;A good woman would be
+      one more anchor to windward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well!&rdquo; said David. &ldquo;And here we are reversed and I'm the patient
+      and you're the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my
+      dear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And it seems to me somebody is very happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am, Doctor David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He patted her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mind you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, do you think so?&rdquo; she asked, breathlessly. &ldquo;I love him so much,
+      Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you are,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;he watched her
+      closely&mdash;&ldquo;if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only know this,&rdquo; she said steadily. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying there,
+      and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook himself and began to read the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="linkseventeen" id="linkseventeen"></a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      XVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;in residence.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste
+      whatever in her clothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never know,&rdquo; said Harrison Miller, &ldquo;when I look up at the Sayre place,
+      whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He spends a great deal of money,&rdquo; she said one day to her lawyer. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, Phelps,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Do it. And I'll select a plant also, to go
+      to Mrs. Wheeler.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The south room could be the nursery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;The Star
+      Spangled Banner.&rdquo; By the end of the service she had decided that Elizabeth
+      Wheeler was the answer to her problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but
+      she found him evasive and not particularly happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're twenty-five, you know,&rdquo; she said, toward the end of a discussion.
+      &ldquo;By thirty you'll be too set in your habits, too hard to please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It takes two to make a marriage, mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's the Queen of Sheba,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll go upstairs and have a
+      headache, if you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a delightful room!&rdquo; said Mrs. Sayre. &ldquo;And how do you keep a maid as
+      trim as that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have service,&rdquo; Nina replied. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Sayre sat down, a gross disharmony in the room, but a solid and not
+      unkindly woman for all that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I am not paying a call. Or not only that. I came to
+      talk to you about something. About Wallace and your sister.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina was gratified and not a little triumphant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Do you mean that they are fond of one another?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wallace is. Of course, this talk is between ourselves, but&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know about Elizabeth. She's fond of Wallie, as who isn't? But
+      lately&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Livingstone! She'd be throwing herself away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A few moments later Leslie came downstairs. Nina was sitting alone,
+      thinking, with a not entirely pleasant look of calculation on her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What were you two plotting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plotting? Nothing, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down at her. &ldquo;Now see here, old girl,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Dick stood with the letter in his hand, staring at it. Who was Bassett?
+      Who was &ldquo;G&rdquo;? 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reread, the cryptic sentences began to take on meaning. An unknown named
+      Bassett, whoever he might be, was going to Norada bent on &ldquo;mischief,&rdquo; and
+      another unknown who signed himself &ldquo;G&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David had been trying to get him out of town.&mdash;The warning referred
+      to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Minnie,&rdquo; he inquired, &ldquo;do you remember the afternoon Doctor David was
+      taken sick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll never forget it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he receive a telegram that day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not that I know of. He often answers the bell himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know whether he had a visitor, just before you heard him fall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had a patient, yes. A man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. He was a stranger to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember what he looked like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Minnie reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a smallish man, maybe thirty-five or so,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I think he
+      had gaiters over his shoes, or maybe light tops. He was a nice appearing
+      person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How soon after that did you hear Doctor David fall?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right away. First the door slammed, and then he dropped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, Dick made a try with Lucy that evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Lucy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;do you know of anything that could have caused
+      David's collapse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of thing?&rdquo; she asked guardedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A letter, we'll say, or a visitor?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he saw that she was only puzzled and thinking back, he knew she could
+      not help him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I was feeling about for some cause. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Things, however, did not turn out just that way. Dick came in, grave and
+      clearly preoccupied, and the first thing he said was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;well, that I can't
+      talk about now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it's the silly talk that I daresay you've heard&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Walter Wheeler drew himself up rather stiffly. Leslie's defection was
+      still in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell me you're tangled up with another woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. At least I think not. I don't know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've said nothing to Elizabeth at all? About the walling off, as you
+      call it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. At first I was simply ashamed of it. I didn't want her to get the
+      idea that I wasn't normal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, as I tell you, I begin to think&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd begun to think there was an understanding between you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick faced him squarely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a warning, all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Undoubtedly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't recognize the name Bassett?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I've tried, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten o'clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter Wheeler got up
+      and went out into the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on upstairs, Margaret,&rdquo; he said to his wife. &ldquo;I've got a visitor.&rdquo; He
+      did not look at Elizabeth. &ldquo;You settle down and be comfortable,&rdquo; he added,
+      &ldquo;and I'll be up before long. Where's Jim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. He didn't go to Nina's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He started with you, didn't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But he left us at the corner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't worry about Jim, mother,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender and solicitous. To
+      him she was just &ldquo;mother.&rdquo; He had never thought of another woman in all
+      their twenty-four years together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it Dick?&rdquo; she asked in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't mind, daddy, do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only want you to be happy,&rdquo; he said rather hoarsely. &ldquo;You know that,
+      don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical man? If he had,
+      would Maggie Donaldson not have said so? She had said &ldquo;a man outside that
+      she had at first thought was a member of the searching party.&rdquo; Evidently,
+      then, Donaldson had not prepared her to expect medical assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bill and Jake are still here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his horse and rode beside the car to the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Comes a little late to do Henry Livingstone much good,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak up, Jake,&rdquo; he said once, irritably. &ldquo;This gentleman has come a long
+      way. It's a matter of some property.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of property?&rdquo; Jake demanded. Jake was the spokesman of the two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not important,&rdquo; Bassett observed, easily. &ldquo;What we want to know is
+      if Henry Livingstone had any family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had a brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it's up to me to trail the brother,&rdquo; Bassett observed. &ldquo;Either of
+      you remember where he lived?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somewhere in the East.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a trifle vague,&rdquo; he commented good-humoredly. &ldquo;Didn't you boys
+      ever mail any letters for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What'd I tell you?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a patient man.&rdquo; Bassett grinned. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked directly at Jake, but Jake's face was a solid mask. He made no
+      reply whatever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+       Bassett asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He never talked about himself,&rdquo; said Jake. &ldquo;If that's all, Mr. Wasson,
+      I've got a steer bogged down in the north pasture and I'll be going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Strange thing,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great many come out here to get away from something, Mr. Bassett.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, to start again. But this man never started again. He apparently just
+      quit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wasson put down her sewing and looked at him thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did the boys tell you anything about the young man who visited Henry
+      Livingstone now and then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. They were not very communicative.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose they wouldn't tell. Yet I don't see, unless&mdash;&rdquo; She
+      stopped, lost in some field of speculation where he could not follow her.
+      &ldquo;You know, we haven't much excitement here, and when this boy was first
+      seen around the place&mdash;he was here mostly in the summer&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean, a son?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody knew. He was here only now and then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett moved in his chair and looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How old do you suppose this boy was?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't ask about him, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said it was a matter of some property?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's rather late, isn't it? Ten years?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what makes it difficult.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another silence, during which she evidently made her decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never said this before, except to Mr. Wasson. But I believe he was
+      here when Henry Livingstone died.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her tone was mysterious, and Bassett stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't think Livingstone was murdered!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she added, when Bassett maintained a puzzled silence, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's your idea, then, that this boy put him into the bed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He almost ditched the car on his way back to Norada, so deeply was he
+      engrossed in thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I declare,&rdquo; Lucy protested to Dick, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we get away from Dick, Lucy,&rdquo; he would say, &ldquo;we'll have beef again,
+      and roast pork and sausage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lucy would smile absently and shake her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll stick to your diet, David,&rdquo; she would say. &ldquo;David, it's the
+      strangest thing about your winter underwear. I'm sure you had five suits,
+      and now there are only three.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night before the departure David went out for his first short walk
+      alone, and brought Elizabeth back with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I found a rose walking up the street, Lucy,&rdquo; he bellowed up the stairs,
+      &ldquo;and I brought it home for the dinner table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lucy came down, flushed from her final effort over the trunks, but gently
+      hospitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's fish night, Elizabeth,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You know Minnie's a Catholic, so
+      we always have fish on Friday. I hope you eat it.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forsaking all others, so long as we both shall live,&rdquo; he said,
+      unsteadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So long as we both shall live,&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you sleep last night?&rdquo; he said, in a highly professional and very
+      distinct voice. Then he kissed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very badly, doctor,&rdquo; she said, also very clearly, and whispered, &ldquo;I lay
+      awake and thought about you, dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd better give you this sleeping powder.&rdquo; Oh, frightfully professional,
+      but the powder turned out to be another kiss. It was a wonderful game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she slipped out into the hall she had to stop and smooth her hair,
+      before she went to Lucy's tidy sitting-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and Jim wove his bit and passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can always get a taxicab,&rdquo; was his imperturbable answer to Jim. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now and then Jim got a car, however. Sometimes he rented one, sometimes he
+      cajoled Nina into lending him hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fellow looks a fool without one,&rdquo; he would say to her. &ldquo;Girls expect to
+      be taken out. It's part of the game.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Taken your car!&rdquo; Mrs. Wheeler exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I hate telling on him, but I spoke to him after the first time, and
+      he did it anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wheeler glanced at her husband uneasily. She often felt he was too
+      severe with Jim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't worry,&rdquo; he said grimly. &ldquo;He'll not do it again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we only had a car of our own&mdash;&rdquo; Mrs. Wheeler protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you wouldn't bring these things to your father, Nina,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;He's been very nervous lately, and he isn't always fair to Jim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it's time Jim was fair to Leslie,&rdquo; Nina said, with family
+      frankness. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know who it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Somebody's he's ashamed of, probably, or he wouldn't be so
+      clandestine about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nina!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went back and crawled carefully into the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going away?&rdquo; Elizabeth asked, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's going to make me a present of something highly valuable, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it looks as though he didn't trust you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's being very polite about it; but, of course, in his eyes I'm a common
+      thief, stealing&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She would not let him go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina, shrewd and suspicious, sensed something of nervous strain in her
+      when she came in, later that day, to borrow a hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Elizabeth,&rdquo; she began, &ldquo;I want to talk to you. Are you going
+      to live in this&mdash;this hole all your life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hole nothing,&rdquo; Elizabeth said, hotly. &ldquo;Really, Nina, I do think you might
+      be more careful of what you say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it's a dear old hole,&rdquo; Nina said negligently. &ldquo;But hole it is,
+      nevertheless. Why in the world mother don't manage her servants&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that I don't intend to lift my finger,&rdquo; Elizabeth interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you're a fool. And it is Dick Livingstone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is, Nina.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina's ambitious soul was harrowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That stodgy old house,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and two old people! A general
+      house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out! I wish you joy of
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; Elizabeth said calmly, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina rose angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I wish you joy of it.&rdquo; And went out, slamming the
+      door behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you think,&rdquo; Mrs. Sayre said at last, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She thought Elizabeth flushed slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure he will, Mrs. Sayre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Sayre tried a new direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That would be wonderful,&rdquo; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was that night that Jim brought the tragedy on the Wheeler house that
+      was to lie heavy on it for many a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;not a good match,
+      perhaps, but a marriage for love, if ever there was one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I guess Elizabeth will have to go home. You'd
+      better come along, Nina.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? Is somebody sick?&rdquo; Elizabeth gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jim's been in an automobile accident. Steady now, Elizabeth! He's hurt,
+      but he's going to be all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They've gone to the hospital in my car,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;They'll be there now
+      any minute, and Mr. Oglethorpe will telephone at once. You are to wait
+      before starting in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The telephone rang and Leslie took the receiver and pushed Elizabeth
+      gently aside. He listened for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; he said. Then he hung up and stood still before he turned
+      around:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't very good news,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I wish I could&mdash;Elizabeth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth had crumpled up in a small heap on the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She fell asleep as the light was brightening in the East, with Dick
+      holding her hands and kneeling on the floor beside her bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this newspaper stuff lately about Jud Clark being alive is dead
+      wrong,&rdquo; he declared, irritably. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure he's dead,&rdquo; Bassett agreed, amiably. &ldquo;You found his horse, didn't
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett nodded, rose and poured out another drink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he observed casually, &ldquo;that even if Clark turned up now, it
+      would be hard to convict him, wouldn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sheriff considered that, holding up his glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, yes and no,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It was circumstantial evidence, mostly.
+      Nobody saw it done. The worst thing against him was his running off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How about witnesses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose if he did turn up you'd make a try for it.&rdquo; Bassett stared at
+      the end of his cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd make a try for it, all right,&rdquo; Wilkins said somberly. &ldquo;There are
+      some folks in this county still giving me the laugh over that case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;a good kid,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be easier on both of us if you were two feet narrower in the
+      beam, old dear,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the love of Mike, don't go far, old man,&rdquo; he besought him. And was
+      startled by the sound of his own voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly. Then&mdash;he
+      was not an imaginative man&mdash;he began to feel that eyes were staring
+      at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off along the
+      trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night he descended stiffly at the livery stable, and turned his
+      weary horse over to a stableman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Looks dead beat,&rdquo; said the stableman, eyeing the animal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's got nothing on me,&rdquo; Bassett responded cheerfully. &ldquo;Better give him a
+      hot bath and put him to bed. That's what I'm going to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look as though you'd struck oil,&rdquo; said the night clerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oil! I'll tell you what I have struck. I've struck a livery stable saddle
+      two million times in the last two days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The clerk grinned, and Bassett idly pulled the register toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;J. Smith, Minneapolis,&rdquo; he read. Then he stopped and stared. Richard
+      Livingstone was registered on the next line above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I thought you were dead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd have sworn&mdash;&rdquo; she muttered, and turning to the button inside the
+      door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that for me, or for the police?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now see here,&rdquo; he said pleasantly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you fooled me all right,&rdquo; she said at last. &ldquo;I thought you were&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he going to sleep in your bed?&rdquo; she demanded belligerently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Until she can have the whole thing,&rdquo; he said, with the new heaviness
+      which had crept into his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are mine. My little girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am yours. For ever and ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darling, darling Dick,&rdquo; she had written. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept with it in
+      the pocket of his pajama coat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;G&rdquo;? And why wouldn't the simplest thing be to locate this Bassett
+      himself?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke to the dog, and it came and sniffed at him. Then it squatted in
+      front of him, looking up into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lonely, old chap, aren't you?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Well, you've got nothing on me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his face partially lathered he heard a knock at the door, and sang
+      out a not uncheerful &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; Dick said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right. Come in and sit down. I'll get this stuff off my face
+      and be with you in a jiffy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm here, Mr. Bassett, on rather a peculiar&mdash;&rdquo; He stopped and looked
+      at Bassett. &ldquo;I see. You were in my office about a month ago, weren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a headache, yes.&rdquo; Bassett was very wary and watchful, but there was
+      no particular unfriendliness in his visitor's eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It never occurred to me that you might be Bassett,&rdquo; Dick said gravely.
+      &ldquo;Never mind about that. Eat your breakfast. Do you mind if I talk while
+      you do it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you have some coffee? I can get a glass from the bathroom. It takes
+      a week to get a waiter here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; Dick said, at last, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett hesitated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you really wanted to do was to see me, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a way, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From his pocketbook he took the note addressed to David, and passed it
+      over the table. Bassett looked at him quickly and took it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you read it, I'll explain something. It was not sent to me. It was
+      sent to my&mdash;to Doctor David Livingstone. It happened to fall into my
+      hands. I've come a long way to find out what it means.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, and looked the reporter straight in the eyes. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett read the note carefully, and looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you know who 'G' is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not. Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll give you another name, and maybe you'll get it. A name that I think
+      will mean something to you. Beverly Carlysle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The actress?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett had an extraordinary feeling of unreality, followed by one of
+      doubt. Either the fellow was a very good actor, or&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry,&rdquo; Dick said slowly. &ldquo;I don't seem to get it. I don't know that 'G'
+      is as important as his warning. That note's a warning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It's a warning. And I don't think you need me to tell you what
+      about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Concerning my uncle, or myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I'm trying to do,&rdquo; Dick said, with a sort of grave patience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to a sort
+      of reluctant admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got your courage with you,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know damned well you won't,&rdquo; Dick said grimly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right-o,&rdquo; the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and to stop
+      a fencing that was getting nowhere. &ldquo;I'm connected with the
+      Times-Republican, in your own fair city. I was in the theater the night
+      Gregory recognized you. Verbum sap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This Gregory is the 'G'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, quit it, Clark,&rdquo; Bassett said, suddenly impatient. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Donaldson,&rdquo; Dick repeated. &ldquo;That was it. I couldn't remember her name.
+      The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; Bassett said, &ldquo;let me give you a drink. You look all in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Dick shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I am&mdash;I
+      have become engaged to a girl, and&mdash;well, I want the story. That's
+      all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You knew her,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't&mdash;married to her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick winced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Out of the mud!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+       He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. &ldquo;I could stand it for
+      myself,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose,&rdquo; Bassett said after a moment, &ldquo;suppose you let that go just now,
+      and tell me more about this&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Go on, you put your cards on the table, and then I'll lay mine
+      out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;unpleasant&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever I was before.&rdquo; he finished simply, &ldquo;and I'll get that from you
+      now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'll have that whisky now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick put down the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm ready, if you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Judson Clark? Jud Clark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not sure,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I'm Clark. I remember her, and the cabin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;that if I ran away I was in pretty serious
+      trouble. What was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. What had Clark done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had shot a man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not&mdash;murder?&rdquo; he asked, with stiff lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Bassett said quickly. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand that. It was murder, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand. The law allows for that, I
+      think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man died, of course?&rdquo; he asked at last, without turning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I ran away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clark ran away,&rdquo; Bassett corrected him. &ldquo;As I've told you, the
+      authorities here believe he is dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After an even longer silence Dick turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you, you don't even know you are Clark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. If I'm not, they'll know. If I am&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+       And after a pause: &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett watched him narrowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His name was Lucas. Howard Lucas.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Now we have that, where does Beverly Carlysle come in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clark was infatuated with her. The man he shot was the man she had
+      married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My head aches like the mischief,&rdquo; he said, and his voice was dull and
+      lifeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My head aches like the mischief,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;Look in that grip and
+      find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made an effort and stretched out on the bed. &ldquo;Good Lord,&rdquo; he muttered,
+      &ldquo;I haven't had such a headache since&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He swore in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that comprehension came the conviction, too, that David had
+      succeeded. He had indeed made a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;I'll pay three-twenty too, while
+      I'm at it. Friend of mine there, going with me. Yes, up to to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been away, haven't you?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I took a little horseback trip into the mountains. My knees are
+      still not on speaking terms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sheriff chuckled. Then he sobered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come and sit down,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm going to watch who goes in and out of
+      here for a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Watching for any one in particular?&rdquo; he managed, after five minutes or
+      so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I'll tell you about it as soon as&mdash;Bill! Is Alex outside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bill stopped in front of them, and nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Now get this&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody's out of luck,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too bad,&rdquo; Wilkins commented rather absently. Then, perhaps feeling that
+      he had not shown proper interest, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The disaster to his plans thus threatened steadied the reporter, and he
+      managed to keep his face impassive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll let you know if he's able to travel. Is this&mdash;is
+      this business you're on confidential?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it is and it isn't. I've talked some to you, and as you're leaving
+      anyhow&mdash;it's the Jud Clark case again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sort of hysteria, I suppose. He'll be seen all over the country for the
+      next six months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett made an effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that got to do with Jud Clark?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for pure invention. Hardly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man doesn't play jokes with the hangman's rope,&rdquo; Bassett commented,
+      dryly. He looked at his watch and rose. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; the sheriff said, comfortably. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;back home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll admit he's got me worried,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look kind of shot up yourself,&rdquo; the doctor commented. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a careful examination of the sleeping man, while Bassett watched
+      his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been a drinking man? Or do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. But I think not. I gave him a small drink this morning, when he
+      seemed to need it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been like this all day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since noon. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more the medical man stooped. When he straightened it was to deliver
+      Bassett a body blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose so,&rdquo; he said, dully. &ldquo;Is it near? I'll go myself and get a
+      room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's my advice. I'll look in later, and if the stupor continues I'll
+      have in a consultant.&rdquo; He picked up his bag and stood looking down at the
+      bed. &ldquo;Big fine-looking chap, isn't he?&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;Married?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose it's all right if she sits in the hall?&rdquo; Bassett inquired,
+      still fighting his losing fight. &ldquo;She can go in if he stirs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right-o,&rdquo; said the doctor, who had been to France and had brought home
+      some British phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett walked back from the hospital alone. The game was up and he knew
+      it. Sooner or later&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a few minutes,&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;No need of excitement.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a fire?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know myself. I've got my orders. That's all.&rdquo; Wilkins came
+      hurrying in. The crowd, silent and respectful before the law, opened to
+      let him through and closed behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's taking Dick's absence very hard,&rdquo; Mrs. Wheeler said one night, when
+      she had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed. &ldquo;She worries me sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Wheeler sighed. Why was it that a man could not tell his children what
+      he had learned,&mdash;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, &ldquo;I will be so happy.&rdquo; And before one knew it one was looking
+      back and saying: &ldquo;I was so happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll be all right,&rdquo; he said aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and whistled for the dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take him around the block before I lock up,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;Suppose something turned up out there,
+      something that would break her heart?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; he called ungraciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've had enough of that in the family, Wallie,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And it's a
+      pretty poor resource in time of trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll have that back, if you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; she said briskly, and flung it, glass and all, out of the
+      window. She was rather impressive when she turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been a fairly indulgent mother,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe you ever cared for any one in all your life,&rdquo; he said
+      roughly. &ldquo;If you had, you would know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was straightening a picture over the mantel, and she completed her
+      work before she turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I care for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, then. I cared for your father. I cared terribly. And he killed
+      my love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm on my way to see the man Dick Livingstone left in his place,&rdquo; Clare
+      said, adjusting her veil at the mirror. &ldquo;I've got a cold. Isn't it queer,
+      the way the whole Livingstone connection is broken up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hardly queer. And it's only temporary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She turned
+      to Wallie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wallie turned to Elizabeth when she had gone, slightly bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's got into her?&rdquo; he inquired. And then, seeing Elizabeth's white
+      face, rather shrewdly: &ldquo;That was one for him and two for you, was it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. Probably.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if you would look like that if any one attacked me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one attacks you, Wallie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not an answer. You wouldn't, would you? It's different, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. A little.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He straightened, and looked past her, unseeing, at the wall. &ldquo;I guess I've
+      known it for quite a while,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;I didn't want to believe
+      it, so I wouldn't. Are you engaged to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It's not to be known just yet, Wallie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a good fellow,&rdquo; he said, after rather a long silence. &ldquo;Not that that
+      makes it easier,&rdquo; he added with a twisted smile. Then, boyishly and
+      unexpectedly he said, &ldquo;Oh, my God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've cared for you for years,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've been a poor lot, but I'd
+      have been a good bit worse, except for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you hear from him by every mail.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There has been nothing to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something in her voice or her face made him look at her closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he written at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first day he got there. Not since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're mixed up in this somehow,&rdquo; he said sharply. &ldquo;You might as well
+      come over with the story. We'll get him. He can't get out of this town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With the words, and the knowledge that in some incredible fashion Dick had
+      made his escape, Bassett's mind reacted instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's eating you, Wilkins?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;Who got away? I couldn't get
+      that tongue-tied bell-hop to tell me. Thought it was a fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't stall, Bassett. You've had Jud Clark hidden upstairs in
+      three-twenty all day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett got up and towered angrily over the sheriff. The crowd had turned
+      and was watching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In three-twenty?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The positiveness of his identification and his indignation resulted in a
+      change in Wilkins' manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll ask you to stay here until I come back.&rdquo; His tone was official, but
+      less suspicious. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an hour before the sheriff returned, and he came in scowling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll see you now,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I'll tell you what we know about your connection with this case,
+      Bassett,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is. I've told you I knew him at home, but not as Clark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livingstone was sick. I thought it would be easier. That's all.&rdquo; His
+      voice sharpened. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did he come into your room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll ask you to explain this. It was on Clark's bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett took it and read it slowly. He was thinking hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The sheriff took the letter and reread it. He was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a good talker,&rdquo; he acknowledged grudgingly. He turned to the maid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Hattie,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We'll have that story again. But just a
+      minute.&rdquo; He turned to the reporter. &ldquo;Mrs. Thorwald here hasn't seen Lizzie
+      Lazarus, the squaw. Lizzie has been sitting in my office ever since noon.
+      Now, Hattie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hattie moistened her dry lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was Jud Clark, all right,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She eyed the sheriff vindictively, but he only smiled grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did I tell you?&rdquo; he said to Bassett. &ldquo;Hell with the women&mdash;that
+      was Jud Clark. And we'll get him, Hattie. Don't worry. Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at Bassett.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice broke; she fumbled for a handkerchief. The sheriff glanced at
+      Bassett.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now where's your Livingstone story?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;All right, Hattie.
+      Let's have it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When an automobile engine back-fired in the street below he went sick with
+      fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said a woman's voice in a whisper. &ldquo;It's the maid, Hattie. Be
+      careful. There's a guard at the top of the stairs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you found Jud Clark, what would you do with him?&rdquo; she demanded. From
+      beneath the hood her eyes searched his face. &ldquo;Turn him over to Wilkins and
+      his outfit?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you know better than that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you got any plan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plan? No. They've got every outlet closed, haven't they? Do you know
+      where he is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A horse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do I know you are not working with Wilkins?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;You could
+      have saved the situation to-night by saying you weren't sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was upset. I've had time to think since.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was forced to trust her, eventually, although the sense of some hidden
+      motive, some urge greater than compassion, persisted in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. He was delirious when he left. That thing about the sheriff being
+      after him&mdash;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&mdash;you know.
+      Wouldn't he do the same thing again, and make for the mountains and the
+      cabin? He went to the cabin before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett looked at his watch. It was half past twelve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if I could get a horse I couldn't get out of the town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It belongs to my son,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave him careful instructions as to how to find the trail, and urged
+      him to haste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you get him,&rdquo; she advised, &ldquo;better keep right on over the range.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, with his foot in the stirrup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem pretty certain he's taken to the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's your only chance. They'll get him anywhere else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;However it turns out,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you've done
+      your best, and I'm grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bev!&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;Bev! Don't look like that!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and ready,
+      fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;there was something that forbade him to think&mdash;but he
+      was weak and emotional. He muttered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Bev! Poor old Bev!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and spoke to
+      him in a quiet voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, old man,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I began to think I was going to miss you after
+      all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss me!&rdquo; Livingstone sneered bitterly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My outfit! I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the night to
+      get you out of this mess.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess,&rdquo; Dick said somberly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face, and
+      he rode closer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See here, Livingstone,&rdquo; he said, in a soothing tone, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and his
+      eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know you,&rdquo; he said doggedly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; The sneer faded, and he turned on Bassett with
+      a depth of tragedy in his eyes that frightened the reporter. &ldquo;My God,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;I killed a man last night! I can't go through life with that on me.
+      I'm done, I tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Last night!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pull yourself together, Livingstone,&rdquo; he said, rather sharply. &ldquo;Think a
+      bit. You didn't kill anybody last night. Now listen,&rdquo; he added
+      impressively. &ldquo;You are Livingstone, Doctor Richard Livingstone. You stick
+      to that, and think about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Dick was not listening, save to some bitter inner voice, for suddenly
+      he turned his horse around on the trail. &ldquo;Get out of the way,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;I'm going back to give myself up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Been drinking my head off,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;If I had a drink now I'd
+      straighten out.&rdquo; He tried to sit up. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can get you a drink, if you'll come on about a mile,&rdquo; Bassett coaxed.
+      &ldquo;At the cabin you and I talked about yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now you're talking.&rdquo; Dick made an effort and got to his feet, shaking off
+      Bassett's assisting arm. &ldquo;For God's sake keep your hands off me,&rdquo; he said
+      irritably. &ldquo;I've got a hangover, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get me that drink, won't you? I'm going to pieces.&rdquo; Bassett found his tin
+      cup where he had left it on a shelf and poured out a small amount of
+      whisky from his flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is all we have,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;We'll have to go slow with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;That's
+      better,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I was all in. I must have been riding that infernal
+      horse for years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once something startled the horses outside, and he sat up and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're here!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think so,&rdquo; Bassett replied, and went to the doorway. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he
+      called back over his shoulder, &ldquo;you go on and finish. I'll watch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come back and eat,&rdquo; Dick said surlily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He picked up his hat and went to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you've been mighty kind, old man,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I've got to go
+      back. I ran last night like a scared kid, but I'm through with that sort
+      of foolishness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd give a good bit,&rdquo; Bassett said, watching him, &ldquo;to know what made you
+      run last night. You were safe where you were.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you are talking about,&rdquo; Dick said drearily. &ldquo;I didn't
+      run from them. I ran to get away from something.&rdquo; He turned away
+      irritably. &ldquo;You wouldn't understand. Say I was drunk. I was, for that
+      matter. I'm not over it yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett watched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said quietly. &ldquo;It was last night, was it, that this thing
+      happened?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know it, don't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, after it happened, do you remember what followed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear fellow,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had first to accept the incredible, himself&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand what you are saying,&rdquo; Dick would say. &ldquo;I'm trying to get it.
+      But it doesn't mean anything to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He even tried the war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;War? What war?&rdquo; Dick asked. And when he heard about it he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A war!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And I've missed it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But soon after that he got up, and moved to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going back,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're after me, aren't they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're forgetting again. Why should they be after you now, after ten
+      years?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. I can't get it, you know. I keep listening for them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett too was listening, but he kept his fears to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you do it?&rdquo; he asked finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was drunk, and I hated him. He married a girl I was crazy about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett tried new tactics. He stressed the absurdity of surrendering for a
+      crime committed ten years before and forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They won't convict you anyhow,&rdquo; he urged. &ldquo;It was a quarrel, wasn't it? I
+      mean, you didn't deliberately shoot him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember. We quarreled. Yes. I don't remember shooting him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you remember?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick made an effort, although he was white to the lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw him on the floor,&rdquo; he said slowly, and staggered a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you don't even know you did it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hated him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I'm an unconscionable cad,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've only cared for one woman
+      in my life. And I've shipwrecked her for good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know who I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'd better be moving,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me ahead, Bassett,&rdquo; he said peremptorily. &ldquo;And give your horse his
+      head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said I told you there was a girl,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Did I tell you her
+      name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. Go to sleep. I thought if I heard it it might help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett lay back and watched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better get some sleep, old man,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is Beverly Carlysle now?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Or do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I saw her not long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she married again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. She's revived 'The Valley,' and she's in New York with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Nellie,&rdquo; he would say, &ldquo;and did you go to the dance on the pier
+      last night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your gentleman friend showed up all right, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes. He didn't telephone because he was on a job out of town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here perhaps David would lower his voice, for Lucy was never far away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you wear the flowers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David would chuckle delightedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's right,&rdquo; he would say. &ldquo;Keep him guessing, the young rascal. We men
+      are kittle cattle, Nellie, kittle cattle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, with a twinkle in his eye. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet grinned understandingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, there's my nephew,&rdquo; David went on, a little note of pride in
+      his voice. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David chuckled over that for a long time after the valet had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You old humbug!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Off on a jaunt after all! And the contempt of
+      you when I was shipped here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suffering Crimus, Miller,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He decided to temporize.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things are about the same,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They're going to pave Chisholm
+      Street. And your Mike knocked down the night watchman last week. I got him
+      off with a fine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope he hasn't been in my cellar. He's got a weakness, but then&mdash;How's
+      Dick? Not overworking?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. He's all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But David was no man's fool. He began to see something strange in
+      Harrison's manner, and he bent forward in his chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Harrison,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there's something the matter with you.
+      You've got something on your mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I have and I haven't. I'd like to see Lucy, David, if she's about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lucy's gadding. You can tell me if you can her. What is it? Is it about
+      Dick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a way, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's not sick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;well, one or two things happened
+      to worry him. One was that Jim Wheeler&mdash;you'll get this sooner or
+      later&mdash;was in an automobile accident, and it did for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David had lost some of his ruddy color. It was a moment before he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Jim,&rdquo; he said hoarsely. &ldquo;He was a good boy, only full of life. It
+      will be hard on the family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Harrison Miller said simply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll go back and send him off for a rest,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm as good as I'll
+      ever be, and the boy's tired. What's the bee in Wheeler's bonnet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Went where?&rdquo; David asked, in a terrible voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David was gripping the arms of his chair with both hands, but he forced
+      himself to calmness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll go to Norada at once,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Get a time-table, Harrison, and
+      ring for the valet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes!&rdquo; David said thickly. &ldquo;Trust your friends to make every damned
+      mistake possible! You've set the whole pack on his trail.&rdquo; And then he
+      fell back in his chair, and gasped, &ldquo;Open the window!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They've got Dick, Lucy,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, David,&rdquo; she said, and came padding in in her bedroom slippers and
+      wadded dressing-gown, a tragic figure of apprehension, determinedly
+      smiling. &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lucy nodded. Her chin quivered. She smoothed his hand, with its high
+      twisted veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, David,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Mother and father, and Henry, and a good many
+      friends. But I need you, too. You're all I have, now that Dick&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo; She felt his fingers tighten on her hand. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your box, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Have the statement read first, and then have her called to
+      corroborate it. Tell the story I have told you&mdash;or no, I'll dictate
+      it to you in the morning, and sign it before witnesses. Jake and Bill will
+      testify too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My brother, Henry Livingstone, was not a strong man,&rdquo; David dictated. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;his name was Clifton Hines&mdash;attacked
+      Henry once, and if it had not been for the two men on the place he would
+      have hurt him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One way and another he was always in the newspapers, and when he saw how
+      Jud was throwing money away Clifton went wild.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;she'd
+      been working at the house&mdash;and I didn't need any conversation to tell
+      me what she thought. All she said was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He didn't do it, doctor. He's still in the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's been here to-night, Hattie, and you know it. He shot the wrong man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First of all,&rdquo; he dictated, in his careful old voice, &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and a
+      determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and
+      angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't act, Nina. I do go about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Nina had a softened moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't think about him,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go
+      out there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're following him up, little sister,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Harrison Miller has
+      gone out, and there's enough talk as it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at
+      her, however. He was very gentle with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 him, 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was from Harrison Miller,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went away then, and they heard the house door close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think safe?&rdquo; she asked, breathlessly. &ldquo;Then he has been in danger? What
+      are you keeping from me?&rdquo; And when no one spoke: &ldquo;Oh, don't you see how
+      cruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me
+      instead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not danger,&rdquo; her father said, slowly. &ldquo;So far as we know, he is well. Is
+      all right.&rdquo; And seeing her face: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a trace,&rdquo; he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will kill her, Walter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's young,&rdquo; he said sturdily. &ldquo;She'll get over it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not think so, and she knew it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a rather queer element in it,&rdquo; he observed, after a time.
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My little girl, and&mdash;Judson Clark!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why didn't he tell me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He saw it as a sort of weakness. He meant to when he came back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must remember,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that Dick's life before this happened, and
+      since, are two different things. Whatever he did then should not count
+      against him now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Then he&mdash;had done something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was young then, remember. Only twenty-one or so. And there was a
+      quarrel with another man. The other man was shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean Dick shot him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You understand, don't you,&rdquo; he added anxiously, &ldquo;that he doesn't
+      remember doing it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting,&rdquo; she said. But
+      she inquired, he thought with difficulty, &ldquo;Did he die?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not lie to her. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant fight
+      again for Dick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they let him go,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He let that pass. &ldquo;Nothing was done about it at the time,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father!&rdquo; she said, and went very white. &ldquo;Is that where he is? In prison?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to steady his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. Why should I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack
+      of masculine understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all a puzzle to me,&rdquo; he said, at last. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew the shade and wound his watch. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Bassett,&rdquo; said that gentleman. &ldquo;We thought you were dead. Well,
+      how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Bassett, noncommittally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too. You
+      had a holiday, anyhow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I had a holiday,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You take it from me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the story's dead, and so is Clark. The
+      Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the
+      station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He had been in a stupor all day,&rdquo; Miller related, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David called
+      Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is my hope,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has been detained in the West on business,&rdquo; Lucy said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He might have sent me a postcard. And he hasn't written Doctor Reynolds
+      at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has been very busy. Get the sugar bowl, Minnie. He'll be back soon,
+      I'm sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Minnie did not immediately move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David,&rdquo; she said, with
+      twitching lips. &ldquo;And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's
+      going on in this town is something awful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to hear it,&rdquo; Lucy said firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After this, Minnie,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we will always set Doctor Richard's
+      place. Then, when he comes&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll
+      wait.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang your hat on the rack and go on up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone
+      at Norada?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I see you know about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We know something, not everything.&rdquo; Suddenly David's pose deserted him.
+      He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. &ldquo;Is he
+      living?&rdquo; he asked, in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so. I'm not certain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you don't know where he is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. He got away&mdash;but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a
+      long story to tell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll get you to call my sister first,&rdquo; David said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While they waited David asked only one question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the
+      doctor who saw him&mdash;you got him, I think&mdash;said he appeared to
+      have been drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am quite sure he had not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move. He sat
+      silent, his eyes closed, his face set.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's about all,&rdquo; Bassett finished. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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 &ldquo;The Valley,&rdquo; and she's in New York with
+      it,' I told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;well,
+      here it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Many thanks for everything, Bassett,&rdquo; he read. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was signed &ldquo;J. C.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett broke the silence that followed the reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, by God, he would not be bound to a chair. He raised himself and stood,
+      swaying on his shaking legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've given up,&rdquo; he said scornfully. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He never killed Howard Lucas,&rdquo; David said, in a tone of conviction.
+      &ldquo;Harrison, read Mr. Bassett my statement to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;no, it wasn't last night. It was years and
+      years ago, and all this time she had hated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happen to have a drink about you, partner?&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man stopped his horse and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty early in the morning for a drink, isn't it?&rdquo; he inquired. Then he
+      saw Dick's eyes, and reached reluctantly into his saddle bag. &ldquo;I've got a
+      quart here,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've traveled forty miles and spent nine dollars to
+      get it, but I guess you need some.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't care to sell it, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bottle? Not on your life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He untied a tin cup from his saddle and carefully poured a fair amount
+      into it, steadying the horse the while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he said, and passed it over. &ldquo;But you'd better cut it out after
+      this. It's bad medicine. You've got two good drinks there. Be careful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've traveled a long way for it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I needed it, I guess.
+      If you'll let me pay for it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forget it,&rdquo; said the man amiably, and started his horse. &ldquo;But better cut
+      it out, first chance you get. It's bad medicine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if you could give me some food?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have lost my horse
+      and I've been wandering all night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guess I can,&rdquo; she replied, not unamiably. &ldquo;You look as though you need
+      it, and a wash, too. There's a basin and a pail of water on that bench.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he said, dully, &ldquo;I tried to lift it, but I'm about all in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better come in. I've made some coffee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not rise. He could not even raise his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I deserved this, but he didn't. I took him away from his wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I sometimes wonder&mdash;&rdquo; Nina began one day, and stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonder what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another girl, you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Some one he knew before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Do you know who has
+      been living here, whom you used to patronize? Judson Clark, one of the
+      richest men in the world!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I'm getting at is this,&rdquo; she said, examining her polished nails
+      critically. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only want him back,&rdquo; Elizabeth said. &ldquo;I don't care how he comes, so he
+      comes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got something,&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;Not much, but enough to work on.
+      Here's where you lost him, Bassett.&rdquo; He pointed with his pencil. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Walter Wheeler stirred and looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of condition was he in when he left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good, they said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're sure it was Livingstone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man there had a tree fall on him. He operated. I guess that's the
+      answer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He considered the situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the answer to more than that,&rdquo; Reynolds said slowly. &ldquo;It shows he
+      had come back to himself. If he hadn't he couldn't have done it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And after that?&rdquo; some one asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett had been listening intently, his head dropped forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose the son doesn't know about Hines?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett sat forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The other time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is under the impression that his mother got the horse for you once
+      before, about ten days before Clark escaped. At night, also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for me,&rdquo; Bassett said decisively. &ldquo;Ten days before that I was&mdash;&rdquo;
+       he got out his notebook and consulted it. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could the Thorwald woman have followed you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why the devil should she do that?&rdquo; he asked irritably. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nevertheless,&rdquo; he finished, &ldquo;I believe she did. She or Hines himself.
+      There was some one on a horse outside the cabin that night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the meeting broke up Miller took a folded manuscript from the table
+      and passed it to Bassett.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Copy of the Coroner's inquiry, after the murder,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Thought it
+      might interest you...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;settled down,&rdquo; and the general trend of
+      opinion, which had previously disapproved him, was now that Elizabeth
+      might do worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're cold,&rdquo; he said almost roughly. He was sometimes rather savage, for
+      fear he might be tender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not cold. I think it's the dead leaves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dead leaves?&rdquo; he repeated, puzzled. &ldquo;You're a queer girl, Elizabeth. Why
+      dead leaves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate the fall. It's the death of the year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense. It's going to bed for a long winter's nap. That's all. I'll
+      bring you a wrap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went in, and came out in a moment with her father's overcoat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he said peremptorily, &ldquo;put this on. I'm not going to be called on
+      the carpet for giving you a sniffle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you so,&rdquo; he stammered. &ldquo;I'm sorry. I'll not do it again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was startled, but not angry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like it,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added hastily, &ldquo;you're not that kind of girl.
+      I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned and looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I'm still in love with you, don't you, Elizabeth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She returned his gaze frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see how you can be when you know what you do know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rdquo;&mdash;he figured
+      quickly&mdash;&ldquo;you've got about fifty-odd years to live yet, and some of
+      these days you'll be&mdash;not forgetting,&rdquo; he changed, when he saw her
+      quick movement. &ldquo;I know you'll not forget him. But remembering and loving
+      are different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she said, her eyes on the moon, and full of young tragedy. &ldquo;If
+      they are, if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love
+      without remembering?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're too deep for me sometimes,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he finished, in a
+      low tone. &ldquo;I'd spend my life thinking of ways to make you happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was touched. She reached down and put her hand on his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You deserve the best, Wallie. And you're asking for a second best. Even
+      that&mdash;I'm just not made that way, I suppose. Fifty years or a
+      hundred, it would be all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd always care for him, you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I'm afraid so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;well, toward fifty years
+      of spinsterhood. The sheer waste of it made him shudder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're cold, too, Wallie,&rdquo; she said gently. &ldquo;You'd better go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was about to repudiate the idea scornfully, when he sneezed! She got up
+      at once and held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are very dear to feel about me the way you do&rdquo; she said, rather
+      rapidly. &ldquo;I appreciate your telling me. And if you're chilly when you get
+      home, you'd better take some camphor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't enjoying it,&rdquo; she explained, when he had kissed her. &ldquo;It's a
+      summer place, not heated to amount to anything, and when it turned cold&mdash;where
+      have you been to-night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dined at the Wards', and then took Elizabeth home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there's no news?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under
+      suppressed excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter, mother? You're worried about something, aren't you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have something to tell you. We'd better go inside.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he inquired. &ldquo;I suppose&mdash;&rdquo; Then he saw her face. &ldquo;Sorry,
+      mother. What's the trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central
+      Washington, a harvest hand or &ldquo;working stiff&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;stiffs&rdquo; regarded him with distrust from the
+      start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They called him the &ldquo;Dude,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;David had deliberately obstructed the course of
+      justice, and was an accessory after the fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give it to somebody else, Joe,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm quitting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The hell you are! When?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to check out to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He never tried that experiment again. He hated himself for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Captain Livingstone!&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;You've forgotten me, sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I've got your visiting card
+      on the top of my head all right. Can you see it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are Livingstone, aren't you? I'd have known&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you've made a mistake, old man,&rdquo; Dick said, feeling for his words
+      carefully. &ldquo;That's not my name, anyhow. I thought, when I saw you staring
+      in at that window&mdash;How about it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy looked at him again, and then glanced away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was looking, all right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've been having a run of hard
+      luck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a lift,&rdquo; he said, awkwardly, when the boy hesitated. &ldquo;I've been
+      there myself, lately.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when at last he had prevailed and turned away he was conscious that
+      the doughboy was staring after him, puzzled and unconvinced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, one day, he met Mrs. Sayre, and saw that she knew him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure it was Livingstone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a minute, mother. What door?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was driving a taxicab.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her incredulously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;I think you've made a mistake,
+      that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense. I know him as well as I know you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he acknowledge his identity?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not in so many words,&rdquo; she admitted. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wallie's first reaction to the news was one of burning anger and
+      condemnation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The blackguard!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he said, angrily pausing before her. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we don't know the truth, Wallie. There's something behind it all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing very creditable, be sure of that,&rdquo; he pronounced. &ldquo;Do you think
+      it is fair to Elizabeth to let her waste her life on the memory of a man
+      who's deserted her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be cruel to tell her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got to be cruel to be kind, sometimes,&rdquo; he said oracularly. &ldquo;Why,
+      the man may be married. May be anything. A taxi driver! Doesn't that in
+      itself show that he's hiding from something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat, a small obese figure made larger by her furs, and stared at him
+      with troubled eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know, Wallie,&rdquo; she said helplessly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the devil of a mess,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say he knew you?&rdquo; he inquired, watching her. &ldquo;I suppose there is no
+      doubt of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly not. He's known me for years. And he asked about David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he repeated, and got up. &ldquo;I'll tell Miller, and we'll get to
+      work. We are all very grateful to you, Mrs. Sayre&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something's troubling you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You're not a bit like yourself,
+      old dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her. To him she was all that was fine and good and sane of
+      judgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got something to settle,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I was wondering while you were
+      singing, dear, whether you could help me out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I sing you're supposed to listen. Well? What is it?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll take a hypothetical case. If you guess, you needn't say. Of course
+      it's a great secret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She listened, nodding now and then. He used no names, and he said nothing
+      of any crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The point is this,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;Is it better to believe the man is
+      dead, or to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no mistake about the recognition?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago within day or two, and
+      talked to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd wait,&rdquo; she advised him. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;He preferred you to me, when you knew I cared. But he has deserted
+      you.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept her message to the end of her visit, and delivered her blow
+      standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth. But I don't know how
+      you'll take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maybe it's something I won't want to hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll tell you, if you won't say where you heard it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture. &ldquo;I don't like secrets,
+      Clare. I can't keep them, for one thing. You'd better not tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; she said, and prepared to depart. &ldquo;I won't. But you might
+      just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw in Chicago
+      this week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return from Chicago Lucy
+      sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That had frightened her
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David's eyes followed her about the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got an idea you're keeping something from me, Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? Why should I do that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then where's Harrison?&rdquo; he demanded, querulously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She told him one of the few white lies of her life when she said: &ldquo;He
+      hasn't been well. He'll be over to-morrow.&rdquo; She sat down and picked up the
+      prayer-book, only to find him lifting himself in the bed and listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Somebody closed the hall door, Lucy. If it's Reynolds, I want to see
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that you, Doctor Reynolds?&rdquo; she asked, in her high old voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dick!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Dick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that, over and over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is he?&rdquo; he was able to ask finally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has been very ill. I began to think&mdash;Dick, I'm afraid to tell
+      him. I'm afraid he'll die of joy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have to break it to him very gently,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And he mustn't see
+      me like this. If you can find some of my clothes and Reynolds' razor, I'll&mdash;&rdquo;
+       He caught suddenly to the back of a chair and held on to it. &ldquo;I haven't
+      taken time to eat much to-day,&rdquo; he said, smiling at her. &ldquo;I guess I need
+      food, Aunt Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sit here,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, to see that he drank the
+      milk slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got the fire going,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And I'll run up now and get your
+      clothes. I&mdash;had put them away.&rdquo; Her voice broke a little. &ldquo;You see,
+      we&mdash;You can change in your laboratory. Richard, can't you? If you go
+      upstairs he'll hear you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've had some news,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made a desperate effort and controlled himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down beside him and took his hand between hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;David,&rdquo; she said slowly, &ldquo;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&mdash;he is
+      downstairs, David.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;We praise thee, O
+      God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee,
+      the Father everlasting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He repeated it in its entirety. At the end, however, his voice broke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Lord, in thee have I trusted&mdash;I doubted Him, Lucy,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick, waiting at the foot of the stairs, heard that triumphant paean of
+      thanksgiving and praise and closed his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a few minutes later that Lucy came down the stairs again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You heard him?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, here I am, like a bad penny!&rdquo; said Dick huskily from the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a long time you've been about it,&rdquo; grumbled David. &ldquo;You young
+      rascal!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; David said awkwardly, and blew his nose with a terrific blast.
+      &ldquo;I've been laid up for a while, but I'm all right now. I'll fool them all
+      yet,&rdquo; he boasted, out of his happiness and content. &ldquo;Business has been
+      going to the dogs, Dick. Reynolds is a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you'll fool them.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've dropped a little flesh, eh, Dick?&rdquo; he inquired. &ldquo;Old bulge is gone,
+      you see. The nurse makes up the bed when I'm in it, flat as when I'm out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm a crying old woman, Dick,&rdquo; David said at last. &ldquo;That's what comes of
+      never feeling a pair of pants on your legs and being coddled like a baby.&rdquo;
+       He sat up and stared around him ferociously. &ldquo;They sprinkle violet water
+      on my pillows, Dick! Can you beat that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I put a cake of scented soap among your handkerchiefs,&rdquo; she said, rather
+      breathlessly. &ldquo;Will you let me have it for Doctor Dick's room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got the soap and gave it to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is going to stay, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly he is going to stay,&rdquo; Lucy said, surprised. &ldquo;This is his home.
+      Where else should he go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Look at him well. Hold him
+      close. Listen to his voice. Because this hour is yours, and perhaps only
+      this hour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the Sayre woman doesn't know about your coming?&rdquo; he asked, when Dick
+      had finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still, she mustn't talk about having seen you. I'll send Reynolds up in
+      the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Call Lucy, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had come, a strangely younger Lucy, her withered cheeks flushed
+      with exercise and excitement, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bring me the copy of the statement I made to Harrison Miller, Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She brought it, patted Dick's shoulder, and went away. David held out the
+      paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read it slowly, boy,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It is my justification, and God willing,
+      it may help you. The letter is from my brother, Henry. Read that, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My darling,&rdquo; it commenced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he had not mentioned her name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had finished the reading Dick sat for a moment with the papers in
+      his hand, thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said finally. &ldquo;Of course, it's possible. Good God, if I could
+      only think it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the answer,&rdquo; David said stubbornly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It gives me a fighting chance, anyhow.&rdquo; Dick got up and threw back his
+      shoulders. &ldquo;That's all I want. A chance to fight. I know this. I hated
+      Lucas&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about&mdash;that?&rdquo; David asked, not looking at him. When Dick did
+      not immediately reply David glanced at him, to find his face set and
+      pained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps we'd better not go into that now,&rdquo; David said hastily. &ldquo;It's
+      natural that the readjustments will take time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll have to go into it. It's the hardest thing I have to face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not dead, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Dick said slowly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Maybe, if you see Elizabeth&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd break her heart, that's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't argue it down,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;I've tried to, desperately. It's a&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't come back, David. They wouldn't have me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a silence he asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much is known here? What does Elizabeth know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The town knows nothing. She knows a part of it. She cares a great deal,
+      Dick. It's a tragedy for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall you tell her I have been here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless you intend to see her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Dick shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even if other things were the same I haven't a right to see her, until
+      I've got a clean slate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's sheer evasion,&rdquo; David said, almost with irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Dick acknowledged gravely. &ldquo;It is sheer evasion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the police?&rdquo; he inquired after a silence. &ldquo;I was registered at
+      Norada. I suppose they traced me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. The house was watched for a while; I understand they've given it up
+      now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They can't prove it, Dick,&rdquo; he said triumphantly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But for all his excitement fatigue was telling on him. Lucy tapped at the
+      door and came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better have your supper before it spoils,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And David
+      needs a rest. Doctor Reynolds is in the office. I haven't told him yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men exchanged glances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Time for that later,&rdquo; David said. &ldquo;I can't keep him out of my office, but
+      I can out of my family affairs for an hour or so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So it happened that Dick followed Lucy down the back stairs and ate his
+      meal stealthily in the kitchen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like you to eat here,&rdquo; she protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've eaten in worse places,&rdquo; he said, smiling at her. &ldquo;And sometimes not
+      at all.&rdquo; He was immediately sorry for that, for the tears came to her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't even seen Elizabeth,&rdquo; she said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will have to wait until things are cleared up, Aunt Lucy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you write her something then, Richard? She looks like a ghost these
+      days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were on him, puzzled and wistful. He met them gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't the right to see her, or to write to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the finality in his tone closed the discussion, that and something
+      very close to despair in his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must take it,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;It breaks my heart to think&mdash;Dick,
+      I have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last time.&rdquo; Then for fear
+      she had hurt him she forced a determined smile. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long and carefully written
+      letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXXIX
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled again as he went on up the street, but his hands as he buttoned
+      his overcoat were shaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorry,&rdquo; Dick said awkwardly, &ldquo;I seem to have a faculty of involving other
+      people in my difficulties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Want a drink?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thanks. I'll smoke, if you have any tobacco. I've been afraid to risk
+      a shop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett talked cheerfully as he found cigarettes and matches. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, a good bit of water has gone over the dam since we met,&rdquo; Bassett
+      said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett was watching him intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has it all come back?&rdquo; he inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Practically all. Not much between the thing that happened at the ranch
+      and David Livingstone's picking me up at the cabin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did it ever occur to you to wonder just how I got in on your secret?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you read Maggie Donaldson's confession.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came to see you before that came out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I don't know, I'm afraid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you would stake your life on the fact that Beverly Carlysle
+      knows nothing of what happened that night at the ranch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick's face twitched, but he returned Bassett's gaze steadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has no criminal knowledge, if that is what you mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not so sure of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you'd better explain that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you misunderstand me, Livingstone,&rdquo; he said easily. &ldquo;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?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had forgotten it. I remember now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not hiding behind her skirts,&rdquo; Dick said shortly. &ldquo;And there's
+      nothing incriminating in what you say. She saw me as a fugitive, and she
+      sent me a warning. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. I accept that, tentatively.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had killed Lucas,&rdquo; Bassett asserted positively, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and opened a table drawer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got out a long envelope, and took from it a number of typed pages,
+      backed with a base of heavy paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Inquest in the Coroner's office on the body of Howard Lucas,'&rdquo; he read.
+      &ldquo;'October 10th, 1911.' That was the second day after. 'Examination of
+      witnesses by Coroner Samuel J. Burkhardt. Mrs. Lucas called and sworn.'&rdquo;
+       He glanced at Dick and hesitated. &ldquo;I don't know about this to-night,
+      Livingstone. You look pretty well shot to pieces.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't sleep last night. I'm all right. Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Anne Elizabeth Lucas. My stage name is Beverly Carlysle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Where do you live, Mrs. Lucas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;At 26 East 56th Street, New York City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Where was Judson Clark?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;He was leaning on the roulette table, staring at the&mdash;at my
+      husband.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Did you see him leave the room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No. I was on my knees beside Mr. Lucas. I think when I got up he was
+      gone. I didn't notice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Did you see a revolver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No. I didn't look for one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Witness excused and Mr. John Donaldson called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;John Donaldson.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Where do you live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;At the Clark ranch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;What is your business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;You know all about me. I'm foreman of the ranch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;I want you to tell what you know, Jack, about last night. Begin with
+      where you were when you heard the shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Did you see the revolver in his hand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;How long between your warning Mr. Clark and the shot?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;I suppose I'd gone a dozen yards.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Were you present when the revolver was found?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Did you see Judson Clark again?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No, sir. From what I gather he went straight to the corral and got his
+      horse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;You entered the room as Mrs. Lucas came in the door?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett looked up from his reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you to get this, Livingstone,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How did she reach the
+      billiard room? Where was it in the house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Off the end of the living-room.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A large living-room?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forty or forty-five feet, about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you draw it for me, roughly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed over a pad and pencil, and Dick made a hasty outline. Bassett
+      watched with growing satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's the point,&rdquo; he said, when Dick had finished. &ldquo;She was there before
+      Donaldson, or at the same time,&rdquo; as Dick made an impatient movement. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She or Donaldson,&rdquo; Dick said obstinately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett read on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jean Melis called and sworn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Jean Melis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Have you an American residence, Mr. Melis?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Only where I am employed. I am now living at the Clark ranch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;What is your business?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;I am Mr. Clark's valet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;It was you who found Mr. Clark's revolver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;Tell about how and where you found it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get that, too,&rdquo; Bassett said, putting down the paper. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;You recognize this revolver as the one you found?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;You are familiar with it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;Yes. It is Mr. Clark's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;You made the second search because you had not examined the woodbox
+      earlier?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A. &ldquo;No. I had examined the woodbox. I had a theory that&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Q. &ldquo;The Jury cannot listen to any theories. This is an inquiry into
+      facts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to find Melis,&rdquo; the reporter said thoughtfully, as he folded up
+      the papers. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must have caused you considerable outlay, one way and another,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;I want to defray that, Bassett, as soon as I've figured out some
+      way to get at my bank account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett jerked out a pillow and thumped it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forget it.&rdquo; Then he grinned. &ldquo;You can fix that when you get your estate,
+      old man. Buy a newspaper and let me run it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent over the davenport and put the pillow in place. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he looked up at Dick's silence, to see him looking at him with a faint
+      air of amusement over his pipe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're going to keep the money, Bassett.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett straightened and stared at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be a damned fool,&rdquo; he protested. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For Heaven's sake, Nina, sit down and read or sew, or do something.
+      You've been at that window a dozen times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not bothering you. Go on and read.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. &ldquo;The Valley&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead,&rdquo; he said to Nina, &ldquo;and he'll
+      come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just
+      fool enough to fall for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before her appraising eyes his own fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a story,
+      would you believe it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to need
+      any excuse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?&rdquo; he asked. He was
+      lighting a cigarette at the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow. I wanted Joe to go alone,
+      but he thinks he needs me.&rdquo; Joe was his partner. &ldquo;Oh. So Joe's going?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was silent. Joe's going was clever of him. It gave authenticity to his
+      business, and it kept her at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long shall you be gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a day or two.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you'll get your things out I'll pack them.&rdquo; She was still thinking,
+      but her tone was indifferent. &ldquo;You won't want your dress clothes, of
+      course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd better have a dinner suit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said
+      slowly. &ldquo;I suppose you will. You'll be going to the theater.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lay on the edge of the bed and thought things over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina threw her hat on the bed and sat down dispiritedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose there's no news?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nina watched her. She was out of patience with Elizabeth, exasperated with
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to go on like this all your life?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;Sitting
+      by a window, waiting? For a man who ran away from you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not true, and you know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're all alike,&rdquo; Nina declared recklessly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elizabeth looked up quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Nina!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You don't mean&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, wake up,&rdquo; Nina said impatiently. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God for it, David.&rdquo; And after a pause: &ldquo;Was he all right? He
+      remembered everything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's not here, Walter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has gone away again, without seeing Elizabeth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      David cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, come,&rdquo; Walter Wheeler said impatiently. &ldquo;Don't try to find excuses
+      for him. Let's have the truth, David. I guess I can stand it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor David, divided between his love for Dick and his native honesty,
+      threw out his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand it, Wheeler,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come to you, a good bit as I would go to God, if he were a person,&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;I have got to know something, and you can tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his arm around her and held her close.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go ahead, honey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy, do you realize that I am a woman now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I try to. But it seems about six months since I was feeding you hot water
+      for colic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat still for a moment, stroking his hair and being very careful not
+      to spoil his neat parting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have never told me all about Dick, daddy. You have always kept
+      something back. That's true, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There were details,&rdquo; he said uncomfortably. &ldquo;It wasn't necessary&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's what I want to know. If he has gone back to the time&mdash;you
+      know, wouldn't he go back to caring for the people he loved then?&rdquo; Then,
+      suddenly, her childish appeal ceased, and she slid from the chair and
+      stood before him. &ldquo;I must know, father. I can bear it. The thing you have
+      been keeping from me was another woman, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was so long ago,&rdquo; he temporized. &ldquo;Think of it, Elizabeth. A boy of
+      twenty-one or so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then there was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe so, at one time. But I know positively that he hadn't seen or
+      heard from her in ten years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of woman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn't think about it, honey. It's all so long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she live in Wyoming?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was an actress,&rdquo; he said, hard driven by her persistence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know her name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only her stage name, honey.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you know she was an actress!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, dear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;if she's living,&rdquo; he added, as an
+      afterthought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was some time before she spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose she was beautiful,&rdquo; she said slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. Most of them aren't, off the stage. Anyhow, what does it
+      matter now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only that I know he has gone back to her. And you know it too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard her going quietly out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long after, he closed the house and went cautiously upstairs. She was
+      waiting for him in the doorway of her room, in her nightgown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it all now,&rdquo; she said steadily. &ldquo;It was because of her he shot the
+      other man, wasn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw her answer in his startled face, and closed her door quickly. He
+      stood outside, and then he tapped lightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me in, honey,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I want to finish it. You've got a wrong idea
+      about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When she did not answer he tried the door, but it was locked. He turned
+      and went downstairs again...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he came home the next afternoon Margaret met him in the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She knows it, Walter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knows what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's terribly proud,&rdquo; she finished. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet was older and heavier, but he had recognized him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he see you?&rdquo; was her first question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. What about it? He never saw me but once, and that was at night and
+      out of doors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes I think I can't stand it, Fred. The eternal suspense, the
+      waiting for something to happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned on him angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't a heart, have you? You're glad he's dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you suppose brought Jean Melis here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He saw me that night, on the stairs. He never took his eyes off me at the
+      inquest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She gave, however, an excellent performance that night, and nothing more
+      was heard of the valet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Personal: Jean Melis, who was in Norada, Wyoming, during the early fall
+      of 1911 please communicate with L 22, this office.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had only one uncertainty. Suppose that Bassett had learned about
+      Clifton Hines?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Nothing
+      here,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;L 22? Here you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I recognized that back,&rdquo; said the reporter, cheerfully. &ldquo;Come
+      over here, old man. I want to talk to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll have that letter now, Gregory,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And I've got a damned good
+      notion to lodge an information against you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what you're talking about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forget it. I was behind you when you asked for that letter. Give it here.
+      I want to show you something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly, with the letter in his hand, Bassett laughed and then tore it
+      open. There was only a sheet of blank paper inside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't sure you'd see it, and I didn't think you'd fall for it if you
+      did,&rdquo; he observed. &ldquo;But I was pretty sure you didn't want me to see Melis.
+      Now I know it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I didn't,&rdquo; Gregory said sullenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think Melis can tell you, that you don't know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll explain that to you some day,&rdquo; Bassett said cheerfully. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here. You may believe it or not, Bassett, but I was going to your
+      town to-night to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Bassett said sceptically, &ldquo;I've got your word for it. And I've got
+      nothing to do all day but to listen to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got a right to know something,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;considering what he's done
+      to me and mine. Clark's alive, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's alive all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How about it?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a taxicab Gregory sat tense and erect, gnawing at his blond mustache.
+      After a time he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you after, in all this? The story, I suppose. And the money. I
+      daresay you're not doing it for love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett surveyed him appraisingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You wouldn't understand my motives if I told you. As a matter of fact, he
+      doesn't want the money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gregory sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't kid yourself,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll see him in about five minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If the news was a surprise Gregory gave no evidence of it, except to
+      comment:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're a capable person, aren't you? I'll bet you could tune a piano if
+      you were put to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not advertising to the world that you're in town, I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll do that, just as soon as we're ready. Don't worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The laugh he gave at that struck unpleasantly on Bassett's ears. But
+      inside the building he lost some of his jauntiness. &ldquo;Queer place to find
+      Judson Clark,&rdquo; he said once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better watch him when I go in. He may bite me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To which Bassett grimly returned: &ldquo;He's probably rather particular what he
+      bites.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Clark,&rdquo; he said, coolly. &ldquo;I guess you didn't expect to see me, did
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I meant to look you up,&rdquo; was his reply to Gregory's nonchalant greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, your friend here did that for you,&rdquo; Gregory said, and smiled across
+      at Bassett. &ldquo;He has his own methods, and I'll say they're effectual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So here we are, again, Jud!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But with this change, that now
+      it's you who are the respectable member of the community, and I'm the&mdash;well,
+      we'll call it the butterfly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was unmistakable insult in his tone, and Dick caught it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I take it you're still living off your sister?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't worry, Bassett,&rdquo; he said, his eyes on Dick. &ldquo;We haven't any reason
+      to like each other, but he's bigger than I am. I won't hit him.&rdquo; Then he
+      hardened his voice. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you won't,&rdquo; Bassett said smoothly. &ldquo;You won't, any more than you did
+      it last spring, when you sent that little letter of yours to David
+      Livingstone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got to make my own position plain in this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Dick for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Donaldson testified I'd had a revolver.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett leaned forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's straight, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm telling you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why in God's name didn't she say that at the inquest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett said nothing. After a silence Dick spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about the revolver?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett was the first to break the silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will be willing to testify to that now, of course?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And stand trial?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not necessarily. Clark would be on trial. He's been indicted. He has to
+      be tried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a chance she'll have to take,&rdquo; Bassett said doggedly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's only one thing to do. You're right, Gregory. I'll never expose
+      her to that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're crazy,&rdquo; Bassett said angrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he grunted at last. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As a man sows, Clark!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You sowed hell for a number of people
+      once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett had to restrain an impulse to kick him out of the door. When he
+      had gone Bassett turned to Dick with assumed lightness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;As a man sows, Clark, so shall he reap.&rdquo; The moral issue was
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose the Hines story goes by the board, eh?&rdquo; he commented after a
+      pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, with a wry smile, &ldquo;and the
+      other fellow reaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the next step?&rdquo; he asked bluntly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll have to leave here. It's too expensive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And after that, what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere. I can
+      grow a beard&mdash;that's the usual thing, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor. &ldquo;It's
+      incredible,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;This came this
+      evening. I sent back the money. D.&rdquo; The note was from Gregory and had
+      evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill. It began without
+      superscription: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now why the devil did he do that?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hattie Thorwald
+    </p>
+<p>
+Jean Melis
+</p>
+<p>
+Clifton Hines
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;old girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jud!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Oh, my dear!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear old Bev!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are trying to make it easier for me. But I know, Jud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm telling you the truth,&rdquo; he said, patiently. &ldquo;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&mdash;well, I don't know.
+      Anyhow, don't look at me as though I willfully saved you. I didn't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat still, pondering that, and twisting a ring on her finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean to do?&rdquo; she asked, after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. I'll find something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't go back to your work?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't see how I can. I'm in hiding, in a sort of casual fashion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose we don't go into that now,&rdquo; he said gently. &ldquo;You've had about all
+      you can stand.&rdquo; He got up awkwardly. &ldquo;I suppose you are playing to-night?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded, looking up at him dumbly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better lie down, then, and&mdash;forget me.&rdquo; He smiled down at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've never forgotten you, Jud. And now, seeing you again&mdash;I&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you promise to go and rest?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. If you say so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was acquiescent and humble. Her eyes were soft, faithful, childlike.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've suffered so, Jud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't hate me, do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Bev!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We've made pretty much a mess of it, haven't we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, Les,&rdquo; Joe said, glancing up from a laborious struggle with a stud.
+      &ldquo;Been to a wedding?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made a call, and since then I've been walking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some walk, I'd say,&rdquo; Joe observed, looking at him shrewdly. &ldquo;What's
+      wrong, Les? Fair one turn you down?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go to hell,&rdquo; Leslie said irritably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung off his coat and jerked at his tie. Then, with it hanging loose,
+      he turned to Joe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe whistled softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not the point,&rdquo; Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice. &ldquo;I'm not
+      defending myself. She's a friend; I've got a right to call there if I want
+      to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure you have,&rdquo; soothed Joe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know? I saw him this afternoon, at her house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a nice kid,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'm fond of her. And I don't know what to
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Joe grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And you can't tell her, or the family, where you saw
+      him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not without raising the deuce of a row.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joe brought him a cocktail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drink it, old dear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leslie took the glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right-o,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How've you been, little sister, while I've been wandering the gay white
+      way?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been all right, Leslie.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not quite all right, I think. Have you ever thought, Elizabeth, that no
+      man on earth is worth what you've been going through?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right, I tell you,&rdquo; she said impatiently. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Well, that's that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he had not counted on her intuition, and was startled to hear her say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well? Go on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean, go on?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You brought me out here to tell me something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all. I simply&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he? You've seen him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to meet her eyes, failed, cursed himself for a fool. &ldquo;He's alive
+      and well, Elizabeth. I saw him in New York.&rdquo; It was a full minute before
+      she spoke again, and then her lips were stiff and her voice strained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he gone back to her? To the actress he used to care for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, but he knew he would have to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night she accepted Wallie Sayre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to know, first, if I am talking to the police.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;and yes,&rdquo; Bassett said genially. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a friend of Mr. Clark's? Then the report was correct. He is still
+      alive, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet got out a handkerchief and wiped his face. He was clearly moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad of that. Very glad. I saw some months ago, in a newspaper&mdash;where
+      is he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Lucas killed him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So she says,&rdquo; Bassett said easily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet jumped and stared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She admits it, as the result of an accident. She also admits hiding the
+      revolver where you found it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you do not need me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not so sure of that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The valet was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I thought she was having an affair with another man. I have
+      always thought she did it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so. What made you think that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not for one of the servants?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fine. Now we'll go to the night Lucas was shot. Was the Thorwald woman
+      there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She had started home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leaving Mrs. Lucas packing alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see. Now about the revolver.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I knew, Melis, why you didn't bring those facts out at the
+      inquest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just one more trip, friend cowhide,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and then you and I are
+      going to settle down again to work. But it's some trip, old arm-breaker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wake up, old top,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Wake up. I have some news for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLIV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Who was I named
+      for, mother?&rdquo; He saw David and Lucy gone, and the old house abandoned, or
+      perhaps echoing to the laughter of Reynolds' children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Judson Clark Not Guilty. A Strange
+      Story.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there was Elizabeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up at Bassett and then sat up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of news?&rdquo; he asked, his voice still thick with sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get up and put some cold water on your head. I want you to get this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you do it?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Why don't you let me go to the devil in my
+      own way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I started this, and by Heaven I've finished it,&rdquo; was Bassett's exultant
+      reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down and produced a bundle of papers. &ldquo;I'm going to read you
+      something,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began to read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up to that point,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I wrote it myself before I saw him.&rdquo; There
+      was a note of triumph in his voice. &ldquo;The rest is his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;(Signed) Clifton HINES.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett folded up the papers and put them in the envelope. &ldquo;I got that,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at Dick, lying still and rigid on the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I think a little drink won't do us any harm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor devil!&rdquo; he said at last. &ldquo;I wish to God I'd known. He was right, you
+      know. No wonder&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometime later he roused from deep study and looked at Bassett.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did you get the connection?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett was in high spirits. He moved about the room immensely pleased
+      with himself, slightly boastful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some little stroke, Dick!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What price Mr. Judson Clark
+      to-night, eh? It will be worth a million dollars to see Wilkins' face when
+      he reads that thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no mention of me as Livingstone in it, is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't necessary to go into that. I didn't know&mdash;Look here,&rdquo; he
+      exploded, &ldquo;you're not going to be a damned fool, are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not going to revive Judson Clark, Bassett. I don't owe him anything.
+      Let him die a decent death and stay dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, piffle!&rdquo; Bassett groaned. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Dick laughed. Bassett watched him, puzzled and angry, with a sort
+      of savage tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're crazy,&rdquo; he said morosely. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; Dick replied, with a new ring in his voice. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what will you be doing in the meantime?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick stretched and threw out his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What should I be doing, old man? I'm going home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are still here, Lucy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them
+      that slept&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice tightened. He put his head down on the side of the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was feeling mighty lonely, my dear,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about word to Dick, David?&rdquo; he inquired awkwardly, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I guess I can fight this out alone, Harrison,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And Lucy will
+      understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know why he can't come, Lucy,&rdquo; he said once. &ldquo;It doesn't mean that he
+      doesn't care. You have to remember that.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David went carefully down the stairs and into his office, and there, at
+      his long deserted desk, commenced a letter to Dick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was sitting there when Dick came up the street...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;All clear,&rdquo; he set out for Haverly, more nearly happy than for
+      months. The very rhythm of the train sang: &ldquo;Going home; going home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;David!&rdquo; he said brokenly. &ldquo;Dear old David!&rdquo; And was suddenly shaken with
+      dry, terrible sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;it was a moment before she realized it&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm so very sorry, Dick,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You have a sad home-coming.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she withdrew her hand, still calm, and turned to David.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother sent over some things. I'll give them to Minnie,&rdquo; she said, her
+      voice clear and steady. She went out, and they heard her descending the
+      stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you suppose she's seen him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was in David's room. She must have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      David, watching him, waited until Harrison had gone, and went directly to
+      the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I'd better not go into that until after&mdash;until later,&rdquo; he
+      explained. &ldquo;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&mdash;you saw her face,
+      David. I think she doesn't even care enough to hate me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's cared enough to engage herself to Wallace Sayre!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After one astounded glance Dick laughed bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That looks as though she cared!&rdquo; he said. He had gone very white. After a
+      time, as David sat silent and thoughtful, he said: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She waited a long time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Later Dick made what was a difficult confession under the circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know now&mdash;I think I knew all along, but the other thing was like
+      that craving for liquor I told you about&mdash;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,&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;united in their shabby strength, they were
+      home to him. They had come back, never to be lost again. Home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're giving up a great deal, Dick,&rdquo; David said. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never,&rdquo; Dick announced, firmly. &ldquo;Judson Clark is dead.&rdquo; He smiled at
+      David with something of his old humor. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never gave up a fight yet.&rdquo; David's voice was grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;except
+      of course to me. What I thought was&mdash;We might go into the city.
+      Reynolds would buy the house. He's going to be married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you'd found out there's nothing in running away from trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Dick straightened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We'll stay here and fight it out together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he thought of Elizabeth, and it became terrible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down on the stool and groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0045" id="link2H_4_0045">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLVI
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walter Wheeler opened the door and admitted him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you might come,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd better tell you at once,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that I have advised Elizabeth to
+      see you, but that she refuses. I'd much prefer&mdash;&rdquo; He busied himself
+      at the fire for a moment. &ldquo;I'd much prefer to have her see you,
+      Livingstone. But&mdash;I'll tell you frankly&mdash;I don't think it would
+      do much good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down and stared at the fire. Dick remained standing. &ldquo;She doesn't
+      intend to see me at all?&rdquo; he asked, unsteadily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's rather out of the question, if you intend to remain here. Do you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An unexpected feeling of sympathy for the tall young man on the hearth rug
+      stirred in Walter Wheeler's breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He
+      hesitated. &ldquo;You've heard of her engagement?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't want it,&rdquo; her father said drearily. &ldquo;I suppose she knows her own
+      business, but the thing's done. She sent you a message,&rdquo; he added after a
+      pause. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you. I'll have to stay, as she says.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another uncomfortable silence. Then Walter Wheeler burst out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as Dick made a gesture:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat still, a troubled figure, middle-aged and unhandsome, and very
+      weary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a bad business, Dick,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time Dick stirred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I first began to remember,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Wheeler nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand. But she wouldn't, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. I don't suppose she would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;playing round.&rdquo; She rather thought it was to take his mind
+      off something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds. &ldquo;I caught cold
+      at the cemetery,&rdquo; she said, when he had arrived and was seated opposite
+      her in her boudoir. &ldquo;I really did,&rdquo; she protested, as she caught his eye.
+      &ldquo;I suppose everybody is sending for you, to have a chance to talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't blame us. Particularly, you can't blame me. I've got to know
+      something, doctor. Is he going to stay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so. Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going, are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she was not interested in his plans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. I'm inclined to think not,&rdquo; he added cautiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean that he hasn't?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know, Mrs. Sayre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is Doctor David?&rdquo; she asked, after a pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better. It wouldn't surprise me now to see him mend rapidly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can see you are not going to talk to me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;So I'll talk to
+      you. Has Dick Livingstone's return made any change between Elizabeth and
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's just the same to you? You must tell me, Wallace. I've been building
+      so much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She realized the change in him then more fully than ever for he faced her
+      squarely and without evasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell me it's still that man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know.&rdquo; He took a turn or two about the terrace. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He faced her again. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That appeal touched her as nothing had done for a long time. &ldquo;I'll help
+      all I can, if the need comes,&rdquo; she said, and turned and went heavily into
+      the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0046" id="link2H_4_0046">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLVII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For things were going very badly. The fight was on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;that was the point at which he always stopped&mdash;where
+      David could pine away in homesickness for them!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an irony in it that made him laugh hopelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is it discharging me you are?&rdquo; he asked, putting down one of David's
+      boots in his angry astonishment. &ldquo;Well, then, I'm telling you you're not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't pay you any longer, Mike. And now that the car's gone&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not thinking about pay. I'm not going, and that's flat. Who'd be
+      after doing his boots and all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look pretty rotten,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It's no time to go to pieces now, when
+      you've put up your fight and won it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right. I haven't been sleeping. That's all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How about the business? People coming to their senses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not very fast,&rdquo; Dick admitted. &ldquo;Of course it's a little soon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's how I see it,&rdquo; he finished. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned on her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You too, I think, Mrs. Wheeler. I'm not attacking you on that score; it's
+      human nature. But it's the truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps. I don't know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on, but more gently, he introduced the subject of Elizabeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I, as things are?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, be friendly, anyhow,&rdquo; he argued. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she is suffering, isn't it possible she cares for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Margaret did not think so. She was so very calm. She was so calm that
+      sometimes it was alarming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 seem 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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what's come over you,&rdquo; he said morosely. &ldquo;But I'll let you
+      alone, if that's the way you feel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry, Wallie. It&mdash;it makes me shiver.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to go over and over it, Wallie. I'll take the blame. I
+      should have done it long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was gentle, almost tender with him, but when he said she had spoiled
+      his life for him she smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what I think?&rdquo; he burst out. &ldquo;I think you're still mad about
+      Livingstone. I think you are so mad about him that you don't know it
+      yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she only smiled her cool smile and went on with her knitting. After
+      that he got himself in hand, and&mdash;perhaps he still had some hope. It
+      was certain that she had not flinched at Dick's name&mdash;told her very
+      earnestly that he only wanted her happiness. He didn't want her unless she
+      wanted him. He would always love her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always,&rdquo; she said, with tragically cold certainty. &ldquo;Men are not like
+      women; they forget.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wondered, after he had gone, what had made her say that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still night, holy night, and only in her was there a stillness that was
+      not holy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm starting a bank account for the little beggar,&rdquo; he said, and dropped
+      a gold piece into the toe. &ldquo;Next year, old girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while he got up and went to his desk, and getting pen and paper
+      wrote carefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you think of this to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned and went, half blindly, into the empty street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O God, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of Thy
+      Son&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0047" id="link2H_4_0047">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XLVIII
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      David was beaten; most tragic defeat of all, beaten by those he had loved
+      and faithfully served.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm all right,&rdquo; he asserted. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doorbell rang. He heard Minnie's voice in the hail, not too friendly,
+      and her tap at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one in the waiting-room,&rdquo; she called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you want to see David. I'm sorry, but he isn't well to-day. He
+      is still in bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't come to see David, Dick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot think you want to see me, Elizabeth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do, if you don't mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood aside then and let her pass him into the rear office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice hardened, for fear it might be soft.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this a professional visit, or a Christmas call, Elizabeth? Or perhaps
+      I shouldn't call you that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Christmas call?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I mean. The day of peace. The day&mdash;what do you think
+      I'm made of, Elizabeth? To have you here, gentle and good and kind&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and stood over her, tall and almost threatening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up at him timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want to be friends, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. A thousand times, no,&rdquo; he said violently. Then, more gently: &ldquo;I'm
+      making a fool of myself. I want your peace and good will, Elizabeth. God
+      knows I need them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You frighten me, Dick,&rdquo; she said, slowly. &ldquo;I didn't come to bring
+      forgiveness, if that is what you mean. I came&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell me you came to ask it. That would be more than I can bear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo; She tried to smile
+      at him. &ldquo;A&mdash;a little work, a sleep, a little love, that's life, isn't
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was watching her intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Work and trouble, and a long sleep at the end for which let us be duly
+      thankful&mdash;that's life, too. Love? Not every one gets love.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hopelessness and despair overwhelmed her. He was making it hard for her.
+      Impossible. She could not go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not come with peace,&rdquo; she said tremulously, &ldquo;but if you don't want
+      it&mdash;&rdquo; She rose. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was stumbling toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elizabeth, what did bring you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned to him, with her hand on the door knob. &ldquo;I came because I
+      wanted to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He strode after her and catching her by the arm, turned her until he faced
+      her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked down into her eyes. &ldquo;A little work, a little sleep, a little
+      love,&rdquo; he repeated. &ldquo;What did you mean by that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just that,&rdquo; she said simply. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Want you!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;More than anything on this earth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometime,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett yawned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have it your own way,&rdquo; he said indifferently. &ldquo;You were shielding
+      somebody, weren't you? No? What's the answer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bassett made no reply. He picked up the paper and pointed to an item with
+      the end of his pencil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seen this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The night editor read it with bewilderment. He glanced up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that got to do with the Clark case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. Nice people, though. Know them both.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the night editor walked away, rather affronted, Bassett took up the
+      paper and reread the paragraph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wheeler, of Haverly, announce the engagement of their
+      daughter, Elizabeth, to Doctor Richard Livingstone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat for a long time staring at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1601-h.htm or 1601-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/0/1601/
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers, and David Widger
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
+ or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
+Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/1601.txt b/1601.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7a09002
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,14126 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Breaking Point
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: September 21, 2008 [EBook #1601]
+Release Date: January, 1999
+[This file last updated: February 21, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+
+
+
+
+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 tie 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.
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+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 Project Gutenberg's The Breaking Point, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BREAKING POINT ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1601.txt or 1601.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/0/1601/
+
+Produced by Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteers
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/1601.zip b/1601.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8198068
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1601.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0dcaa48
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1601 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1601)
diff --git a/old/brkpt10.txt b/old/brkpt10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cfac5c5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/brkpt10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,14559 @@
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Breaking Point, by Rinehart*
+#6 in our series by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+The Breaking Point
+
+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+January, 1999  [Etext #1601]
+[Date last updated: June 9, 2006]
+
+
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Breaking Point, by Rinehart*
+******This file should be named brkpt10.txt or brkpt10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, brkpt11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, brkpt10a.txt
+
+
+This etext was prepared by anonymous Project Gutenberg voluneers.
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by anonymous Project Gutenberg voluneers.
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
diff --git a/old/brkpt10.zip b/old/brkpt10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d1dbe14
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/brkpt10.zip