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The Breaking Point

by Mary Roberts Rinehart · English · Gutenberg #1601 · 639,608 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Breaking Point

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart


        
Release date: January 1, 1999 [eBook #1601]
                Most recently updated: July 6, 2018

Language: English

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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cloistered in some quiet spot, withdrawn from the world; a place where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 quie

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