He repeated it in its entirety. At the end, however, his voice broke.

"O Lord, in thee have I trusted—I doubted Him, Lucy," he said.

Dick, waiting at the foot of the stairs, heard that triumphant paean of thanksgiving and praise and closed his eyes.

It was a few minutes later that Lucy came down the stairs again.

"You heard him?" she asked. "Oh, Dick, he had frightened me. It was more than a question of himself and you. He was making it one of himself and God."

She let him go up alone and waited below, straining her ears, but she heard nothing beyond David's first hoarse cry, and after a little she went into her sitting-room and shut the door.

Whatever lay underneath, there was no surface drama in the meeting. The determination to ignore any tragedy in the situation was strong in them both, and if David's eyes were blurred and his hands trembling, if Dick's first words were rather choked, they hid their emotion carefully.

"Well, here I am, like a bad penny!" said Dick huskily from the doorway.

"And a long time you've been about it," grumbled David. "You young rascal!"

He held out his hand, and Dick crushed it between both of his. He was startled at the change in David. For a moment he could only stand there, holding his hand, and trying to keep his apprehension out of his face.

"Sit down," David said awkwardly, and blew his nose with a terrific blast. "I've been laid up for a while, but I'm all right now. I'll fool them all yet," he boasted, out of his happiness and content. "Business has been going to the dogs, Dick. Reynolds is a fool."

"Of course you'll fool them." There was still a band around Dick's throat. It hurt him to look at David, so thin and feeble, so sunken from his former portliness. And David saw his eyes, and knew.

"I've dropped a little flesh, eh, Dick?" he inquired. "Old bulge is gone, you see. The nurse makes up the bed when I'm in it, flat as when I'm out."

Suddenly his composure broke. He was a feeble and apprehensive old man, shaken with the tearless sobbing of weakness and age. Dick put an arm across his shoulders, and they sat without speech until David was quiet again.

"I'm a crying old woman, Dick," David said at last. "That's what comes of never feeling a pair of pants on your legs and being coddled like a baby." He sat up and stared around him ferociously. "They sprinkle violet water on my pillows, Dick! Can you beat that?"

Warned by Lucy, the nurse went to her room and did not disturb them. But she sat for a time in her rocking-chair, before she changed into the nightgown and kimono in which she slept on the couch in David's room. She knew the story, and her kindly heart ached within her. What good would it do after all, this home-coming? Dick could not stay. It was even dangerous. Reynolds had confided to her that he suspected a watch on the house by the police, and that the mail was being opened. What good was it?

Across the hall she could hear Lucy moving briskly about in Dick's room, changing the bedding, throwing up the windows, opening and closing bureau drawers. After a time Lucy tapped at her door and she opened it.

"I put a cake of scented soap among your handkerchiefs," she said, rather breathlessly. "Will you let me have it for Doctor Dick's room?"

She got the soap and gave it to her.

"He is going to stay, then?"

"Certainly he is going to stay," Lucy said, surprised. "This is his home. Where else should he go?"

But David knew. He lay, listening with avid interest to Dick's story, asking a question now and then, nodding over Dick's halting attempt to reconstruct the period of his confusion, but all the time one part of him, a keen and relentless inner voice, was saying: "Look at him well. Hold him close. Listen to his voice. Because this hour is yours, and perhaps only this hour."

"Then the Sayre woman doesn't know about your coming?" he asked, when Dick had finished.

"Still, she mustn't talk about having seen you. I'll send Reynolds up in the morning."

He was eager to hear of what had occurred in the long interval between them, and good, bad and indifferent Dick told him. But he limited himself to events, and did not touch on his mental battles, and David saw and noted it. The real story, he knew, lay there, but it was not time for it. After a while he raised himself in his bed.

"Call Lucy, Dick."

When she had come, a strangely younger Lucy, her withered cheeks flushed with exercise and excitement, he said:

"Bring me the copy of the statement I made to Harrison Miller, Lucy."

She brought it, patted Dick's shoulder, and went away. David held out the paper.

"Read it slowly, boy," he said. "It is my justification, and God willing, it may help you. The letter is from my brother, Henry. Read that, too."

Lucy, having got Dick's room in readiness, sat down in it to await his coming. Downstairs, in the warming oven, was his supper. His bed, with the best blankets, was turned down and ready. His dressing-gown and slippers were in their old accustomed place. She drew a long breath.

Below, Doctor Reynolds came in quietly and stood listening. The house was very still, and he decided that his news, which was after all no news, could wait. He went into the office and got out a sheet of note-paper, with his name at the top, and began his nightly letter to Clare Rossiter.

"My darling," it commenced.

Above, David lay in his bed and Dick read the papers in his hand. And as he read them David watched him. Not once, since Dick's entrance, had he mentioned Elizabeth. David lay still and pondered that. There was something wrong about it. This was Dick, their own Dick; no shadowy ghost of the past, but Dick himself. True, an older Dick, strangely haggard and with gray running in the brown of his hair, but still Dick; the Dick whose eyes had lighted at the sight of a girl, who had shamelessly persisted in holding her hand at that last dinner, who had almost idolatrously loved her.

And he had not mentioned her name.

When he had finished the reading Dick sat for a moment with the papers in his hand, thinking.

"I see," he said finally. "Of course, it's possible. Good God, if I could only think it."

"It's the answer," David said stubbornly. "He was prowling around, and fired through the window. Donaldson made the statement at the inquest that some one had been seen on the place, and that he notified you that night after dinner. He'd put guards around the place."

"It gives me a fighting chance, anyhow." Dick got up and threw back his shoulders. "That's all I want. A chance to fight. I know this. I hated Lucas—he was a poor thing and you know what he did to me. But I never thought of killing him. That wouldn't have helped matters. It was too late."

"What about—that?" David asked, not looking at him. When Dick did not immediately reply David glanced at him, to find his face set and pained.

"Perhaps we'd better not go into that now," David said hastily. "It's natural that the readjustments will take time."

"We'll have to go into it. It's the hardest thing I have to face."

"It's not dead, then?"

"No," Dick said slowly. "It's not dead, David. And I'd better bring it into the open. I've fought it to the limit by myself. It's the one thing that seems to have survived the shipwreck. I can't argue it down or think it down."

"Maybe, if you see Elizabeth—"

"I'd break her heart, that's all."

He tried to make David understand. He told in its sordid details his failure to kill it, his attempts to sink memory and conscience in Chicago and their failure, the continued remoteness of Elizabeth and what seemed to him the flesh and blood reality of the other woman. That she was yesterday, and Elizabeth was long ago.

"I can't argue it down," he finished. "I've tried to, desperately. It's a—I think it's a wicked thing, in a way. And God knows all she ever got out of it was suffering. She must loathe the thought of me."

David was compelled to let it rest there. He found that Dick was doggedly determined to see Beverly Carlysle. After that, he didn't know. No man wanted to surrender himself for trial, unless he was sure himself of whether he was innocent or guilty. If there was a reasonable doubt—but what did it matter one way or the other? His place was gone, as he'd made it, gone if he was cleared, gone if he was convicted.

"I can't come back, David. They wouldn't have me."

After a silence he asked:

"How much is known here? What does Elizabeth know?"

"The town knows nothing. She knows a part of it. She cares a great deal, Dick. It's a tragedy for her."

"Shall you tell her I have been here?"

"Not unless you intend to see her."

But Dick shook his head.

"Even if other things were the same I haven't a right to see her, until I've got a clean slate."

"That's sheer evasion," David said, almost with irritation.

"Yes," Dick acknowledged gravely. "It is sheer evasion."

"What about the police?" he inquired after a silence. "I was registered at Norada. I suppose they traced me?"

"Yes. The house was watched for a while; I understand they've given it up now."

In response to questions about his own condition David was almost querulous. He was all right. He would get well if they'd let him, and stop coddling him. He would get up now, in spite of them. He was good for one more fight before he died, and he intended to make it, in a court if necessary.

"They can't prove it, Dick," he said triumphantly. "I've been over it every day for months. There is no case. There never was a case, for that matter. They're a lot of pin-headed fools, and we'll show them up, boy. We'll show them up."

But for all his excitement fatigue was telling on him. Lucy tapped at the door and came in.

"You'd better have your supper before it spoils," she said. "And David needs a rest. Doctor Reynolds is in the office. I haven't told him yet."

The two men exchanged glances.

"Time for that later," David said. "I can't keep him out of my office, but I can out of my family affairs for an hour or so."

So it happened that Dick followed Lucy down the back stairs and ate his meal stealthily in the kitchen.

"I don't like you to eat here," she protested.

"I've eaten in worse places," he said, smiling at her. "And sometimes not at all." He was immediately sorry for that, for the tears came to her eyes.

He broke as gently as he could the news that he could not stay, but it was a great blow to her. Her sagging chin quivered piteously, and it took all the cheerfulness he could summon and all the promises of return he could make to soften the shock.

"You haven't even seen Elizabeth," she said at last.

"That will have to wait until things are cleared up, Aunt Lucy."

"Won't you write her something then, Richard? She looks like a ghost these days."

Her eyes were on him, puzzled and wistful. He met them gravely.

"I haven't the right to see her, or to write to her."

And the finality in his tone closed the discussion, that and something very close to despair in his face.

For all his earlier hunger he ate very little, and soon after he tiptoed up the stairs again to David's room. When he came down to the kitchen later on he found her still there, at the table where he had left her, her arms across it and her face buried in them. On a chair was the suitcase she had hastily packed for him, and a roll of bills lay on the table.

"You must take it," she insisted. "It breaks my heart to think—Dick, I have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last time." Then for fear she had hurt him she forced a determined smile. "Don't pay any attention to me. David will tell you that I have said, over and over, that I'd never see you again. And here you are!"

He was going. He had said good-bye to David and was going at once. She accepted it with a stoicism born of many years of hail and farewell, kissed him tenderly, let her hand linger for a moment on the rough sleeve of his coat, and then let him out by the kitchen door into the yard. But long after he had gone she stood in the doorway, staring out...

In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long and carefully written letter.

"I am not good at putting myself on paper, as you know, dear heart. But this I do know. I do not believe that real love dies. We may bury it, so deep that it seems to be entirely dead, but some day it sends up a shoot, and it either lives, or the business of killing it has to be begun all over again. So when we quarrel, I always know—"



XXXIX

The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David's appearance and Lucy's grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed and unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own innocence was subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old life.

Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and resentment at his presence there. The laboratory window was dark, and he stood outside and looked at it. He would have given his hope of immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope. Even the memory of certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him, and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and bitterness.

He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world and take it. He could hardly tear himself away.

Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock, and he had a half hour to spare before train-time. Following an impulse he did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house. Just so months ago had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the way. Yet that it somehow drew him he knew. Not with the yearning he had felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.

Yet, for a man who did not love, he was oddly angry at the sight of two young figures on the doorstep. Their clear voices came to him across the quiet street, vibrant and full of youth. It was the Sayre boy and Elizabeth.

He half stopped, and looked across. They were quite oblivious of him, intent and self-absorbed. As he had viewed Reynolds' unconscious figure with jealous dislike, so he viewed Wallace Sayre. Here, everywhere, his place was filled. He was angry with an unreasoning, inexplicable anger, angry at Elizabeth, angry at the boy, and at himself.

He had but to cross the street and take his place there. He could drive that beardless youngster away with a word. The furious possessive jealousy of the male animal, which had nothing to do with love, made him stop and draw himself up as he stared across.

Then he smiled wryly and went on. He could do it, but he did not want to. He would never do it. Let them live their lives, and let him live his. But he knew that there, across the street, so near that he might have raised his voice and summoned her, he was leaving the best thing that had come into his life; the one fine and good thing, outside of David and Lucy. That against its loss he had nothing but an infatuation that had ruined three lives already, and was not yet finished.

He stopped and, turning, looked back. He saw the girl bend down and put a hand on Wallie Sayre's shoulder, and the boy's face upturned and looking into hers. He shook himself and went on. After all, that was best. He felt no anger now. She deserved better than to be used to help a man work out his salvation. She deserved youth, and joyousness, and the forgetfulness that comes with time. She was already forgetting.

He smiled again as he went on up the street, but his hands as he buttoned his overcoat were shaking.

It was shortly after that that he met the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe. He passed him quickly, but he was conscious that the clergyman had stopped and was staring after him. Half an hour later, sitting in the empty smoker of the train, he wondered if he had not missed something there. Perhaps the church could have helped him, a good man's simple belief in right and wrong. He was wandering in a gray no-man's land, without faith or compass.

David had given him the location of Bassett's apartment house, and he found it quickly. He was in a state of nervous irritability by that time, for the sense of being a fugitive was constantly stressed in the familiar streets by the danger of recognition. It was in vain that he argued with himself that only the police were interested in his movements, and the casual roundsman not at all. He found himself shying away from them like a nervous horse.

But if he expected any surprise from Bassett he was disappointed. He greeted him as if he had seen him yesterday, and explained his lack of amazement in his first words.

"Doctor Livingstone telephoned me. Sit down, man, and let me look at you. You've given me more trouble than any human being on earth."

"Sorry," Dick said awkwardly, "I seem to have a faculty of involving other people in my difficulties."

"Want a drink?"

"No, thanks. I'll smoke, if you have any tobacco. I've been afraid to risk a shop."

Bassett talked cheerfully as he found cigarettes and matches. "The old boy had a different ring to his voice to-night. He was going down pretty fast, Livingstone; was giving up the fight. But I fancy you've given him a new grip on the earth." When they were seated, however, a sort of awkwardness developed. To Dick, Bassett had been a more or less shadowy memory, clouded over with the details and miseries of the flight. And Bassett found Dick greatly altered. He was older than he remembered him. The sort of boyishness which had come with the resurrection of his early identity had gone, and the man who sat before him was grave, weary, and much older. But his gaze was clear and direct.

"Well, a good bit of water has gone over the dam since we met," Bassett said. "I nearly broke a leg going down that infernal mountain again. And I don't mind telling you that I came within an ace of landing in the Norada jail. They knew I'd helped you get away. But they couldn't prove it."

"I got out, because I didn't see any need of dragging you down with me. I was a good bit of a mess just then, but I could reason that out, anyhow. It wasn't entirely unselfish, either. I had a better chance without you. Or thought I did."

Bassett was watching him intently.

"Has it all come back?" he inquired.

"Practically all. Not much between the thing that happened at the ranch and David Livingstone's picking me up at the cabin."

"Did it ever occur to you to wonder just how I got in on your secret?"

"I suppose you read Maggie Donaldson's confession."

"I came to see you before that came out."

"Then I don't know, I'm afraid."

"I suppose you would stake your life on the fact that Beverly Carlysle knows nothing of what happened that night at the ranch?"

Dick's face twitched, but he returned Bassett's gaze steadily.

"She has no criminal knowledge, if that is what you mean."

"I am not so sure of it."

"I think you'd better explain that."

At the cold anger in Dick's voice Bassett stared at him. So that was how the wind lay. Poor devil! And out of the smug complacence of his bachelor peace Bassett thanked his stars for no women in his life.

"I'm afraid you misunderstand me, Livingstone," he said easily. "I don't think that she shot Lucas. But I don't think she has ever told all she knows. I've got the coroner's inquest here, and we'll go over it later. I'll tell you how I got onto your trail. Do you remember taking Elizabeth Wheeler to see 'The Valley?'"

"I had forgotten it. I remember now."

"Well, Gregory, the brother, saw you and recognized you. I was with him. He tried to deny you later, but I was on. Of course he told her, and I think she sent him to warn David Livingstone. They knew I was on the trail of a big story. Then I think Gregory stayed here to watch me when the company made its next jump. He knew I'd started, for he sent David Livingstone the letter you got. By the way, that letter nearly got me jailed in Norada."

"I'm not hiding behind her skirts," Dick said shortly. "And there's nothing incriminating in what you say. She saw me as a fugitive, and she sent me a warning. That's all."

"Easy, easy, old man. I'm not pinning anything on her. But I want, if you don't mind, to carry this through. I have every reason to believe that, some time before you got to Norada, the Thorwald woman was on my trail. I know that I was followed to the cabin the night I stayed there, and that she got a saddle horse from her son that night, her son by Thorwald, either for herself or some one else."

"All right. I accept that, tentatively."

"That means that she knew I was coming to Norada. Think a minute; I'd kept my movements quiet, but Beverly Carlysle knew, and her brother. When they warned David they warned her."

"I don't believe it."

"If you had killed Lucas," Bassett asserted positively, "the Thorwald woman would have let the sheriff get you, and be damned to you. She had no reason to love you. You'd kept her son out of what she felt was his birthright."

He got up and opened a table drawer.

"I've got a copy of the coroner's inquest here. It will bear going over. And it may help you to remember, too. We needn't read it all. There's a lot that isn't pertinent."

He got out a long envelope, and took from it a number of typed pages, backed with a base of heavy paper.

"'Inquest in the Coroner's office on the body of Howard Lucas,'" he read. "'October 10th, 1911.' That was the second day after. 'Examination of witnesses by Coroner Samuel J. Burkhardt. Mrs. Lucas called and sworn.'" He glanced at Dick and hesitated. "I don't know about this to-night, Livingstone. You look pretty well shot to pieces."

"I didn't sleep last night. I'm all right. Go on."

During the reading that followed he sat back in his deep chair, his eyes closed. Except that once or twice he clenched his hands he made no movement whatever.

Q. "What is your name?"

A. "Anne Elizabeth Lucas. My stage name is Beverly Carlysle."

Q. "Where do you live, Mrs. Lucas?"

A. "At 26 East 56th Street, New York City."

Q. "I shall have to ask you some questions that are necessarily painful at this time. I shall be as brief as possible. Perhaps it will be easier for you to tell so much as you know of what happened the night before last at the Clark ranch."

A. "I cannot tell very much. I am confused, too. I was given a sleeping powder last night. I can only say that I heard a shot, and thought at first that it was fired from outside. I ran down the stairs, and back to the billiard room. As I entered the room Mr. Donaldson came in through a window. My husband was lying on the floor. That is all."

Q. "Where was Judson Clark?"

A. "He was leaning on the roulette table, staring at the—at my husband."

Q. "Did you see him leave the room?"

A. "No. I was on my knees beside Mr. Lucas. I think when I got up he was gone. I didn't notice."

Q. "Did you see a revolver?"

A. "No. I didn't look for one."

Q. "Now I shall ask you one more question, and that is all. Had there been any quarrel between Mr. Lucas and Mr. Clark that evening in your presence?"

A. "No. But I had quarreled with them both. They were drinking too much. I had gone to my room to pack and go home. I was packing when I heard the shot."

Witness excused and Mr. John Donaldson called.

Q. "What is your name?"

A. "John Donaldson."

Q. "Where do you live?"

A. "At the Clark ranch."

Q. "What is your business?"

A. "You know all about me. I'm foreman of the ranch."

Q. "I want you to tell what you know, Jack, about last night. Begin with where you were when you heard the shot."

A. "I was on the side porch. The billiard room opens on to it. I'd been told by the corral boss earlier in the evening that he'd seen a man skulking around the house. There'd been a report like that once or twice before, and I set a watch. I put Ben Haggerty at the kitchen wing with a gun, and I took up a stand on the porch. Before I did that I told Judson, but I don't think he took it in. He'd been lit up like a house afire all evening. I asked for his gun, but he said he didn't know where it was, and I went back to my house and got my own. Along about eight o'clock I thought I saw some one in the shrubbery, and I went out as quietly as I could. But it was a woman, Hattie Thorwald, who was working at the ranch.

"When I left the men were playing roulette. I looked in as I went back, and Judson had a gun in his hand. He said; 'I found it, Jack.' I saw he was very drunk, and I told him to put it up, I'd got mine. It had occurred to me that I'd better warn Haggerty to be careful, and I started along the verandah to tell him not to shoot except to scare. I had only gone a few steps when I heard a shot, and ran back. Mr. Lucas was on the floor dead, and Judson was as the lady said. He must have gone out while I was bending over the body."

Q. "Did you see the revolver in his hand?"

A. "No."

Q. "How long between your warning Mr. Clark and the shot?"

A. "I suppose I'd gone a dozen yards."

Q. "Were you present when the revolver was found?"

A. "No, sir."

Q. "Did you see Judson Clark again?"

A. "No, sir. From what I gather he went straight to the corral and got his horse."

Q. "You entered the room as Mrs. Lucas came in the door?"

A. "Well, she's wrong about that. She was there a little ahead of me. She'd reached the body before I got in. She was stooping over it."

Bassett looked up from his reading.

"I want you to get this, Livingstone," he said. "How did she reach the billiard room? Where was it in the house?"

"Off the end of the living-room."

"A large living-room?"

"Forty or forty-five feet, about."

"Will you draw it for me, roughly?"

He passed over a pad and pencil, and Dick made a hasty outline. Bassett watched with growing satisfaction.

"Here's the point," he said, when Dick had finished. "She was there before Donaldson, or at the same time," as Dick made an impatient movement. "But he had only a dozen yards to go. She was in her room, upstairs. To get down in that time she had to leave her room, descend a staircase, cross a hall and run the length of the living-room, forty-five feet. If the case had ever gone to trial she'd have had to do some explaining."

"She or Donaldson," Dick said obstinately.

Bassett read on:

Jean Melis called and sworn.

Q. "Your name?"

A. "Jean Melis."

Q. "Have you an American residence, Mr. Melis?"

A. "Only where I am employed. I am now living at the Clark ranch."

Q. "What is your business?"

A. "I am Mr. Clark's valet."

Q. "It was you who found Mr. Clark's revolver?"

A. "Yes."

Q. "Tell about how and where you found it."

A. "I made a search early in the evening. I will not hide from you that I meant to conceal it if I discovered it. A man who is drunk is not guilty of what he does. I did not find it. I went back that night, when the people had gone, and found it beneath the carved woodbox, by the fireplace. I did not know that the sheriff had placed a man outside the window."

"Get that, too," Bassett said, putting down the paper. "The Frenchman was fond of you, and he was doing his blundering best. But the sheriff expected you back and had had the place watched, so they caught him. But that's not the point. A billiard room is a hard place to hide things in. I take it yours was like the average."

Dick nodded.

"All right. This poor boob of a valet made a search and didn't find it. Later he found it. Why did he search? Wasn't it the likely thing that you'd carried it away with you? Do you suppose for a moment that with Donaldson and the woman in the room you hid it there, and then went back and stood behind the roulette table, leaning on it with both hands, and staring? Not at all. Listen to this:

Q. "You recognize this revolver as the one you found?"

A. "Yes."

Q. "You are familiar with it?"

A. "Yes. It is Mr. Clark's."

Q. "You made the second search because you had not examined the woodbox earlier?"

A. "No. I had examined the woodbox. I had a theory that—"

Q. "The Jury cannot listen to any theories. This is an inquiry into facts."

"I'm going to find Melis," the reporter said thoughtfully, as he folded up the papers. "The fact is, I mailed an advertisement to the New York papers to-day. I want to get that theory of his. It's the servants in the house who know what is going on. I've got an idea that he'd stumbled onto something. He'd searched for the revolver, and it wasn't there. He went back and it was. All that conflicting evidence, and against it, what? That you'd run away!"

But he saw that Dick was very tired, and even a little indifferent. He would be glad to know that his hands were clean, but against the intimation that Beverly Carlysle had known more than she had disclosed he presented a dogged front of opposition. After a time Bassett put the papers away and essayed more general conversation, and there he found himself met half way and more. He began to get Dick as a man, for the first time, and as a strong man. He watched his quiet, lined face, and surmised behind it depths of tenderness and gentleness. No wonder the little Wheeler girl had worshipped him.

It was settled that Dick was to spend the night there, and such plans as he had Bassett left until morning. But while he was unfolding the bed-lounge on which Dick was to sleep, Dick opened a line of discussion that cost the reporter an hour or two's sleep before he could suppress his irritation.

"I must have caused you considerable outlay, one way and another," he said. "I want to defray that, Bassett, as soon as I've figured out some way to get at my bank account."

Bassett jerked out a pillow and thumped it.

"Forget it." Then he grinned. "You can fix that when you get your estate, old man. Buy a newspaper and let me run it!"

He bent over the davenport and put the pillow in place. "All you'll have to do is to establish your identity. The institutions that got it had to give bond. I hope you're not too long for this bed."

But he looked up at Dick's silence, to see him looking at him with a faint air of amusement over his pipe.

"They're going to keep the money, Bassett."

Bassett straightened and stared at him.

"Don't be a damned fool," he protested. "It's your money. Don't tell me you're going to give it to suffering humanity. That sort of drivel makes me sick. Take it, give it away if you like, but for God's sake don't shirk your job."

Dick got up and took a turn or two around the room. Then, after an old habit, he went to the window and stood looking out, but seeing nothing.

"It's not that, Bassett. I'm afraid of the accursed thing. I might talk a lot of rot about wanting to work with my hands. I wouldn't if I didn't have to, any more than the next fellow. I might fool myself, too, with thinking I could work better without any money worries. But I've got to remember this. It took work to make a man of me before, and it will take work to keep me going the way I intend to go, if I get my freedom."

Sometime during the night Bassett saw that the light was still burning by the davenport, and went in. Dick was asleep with a volume of Whitman open on his chest, and Bassett saw what he had been reading.

"You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you short-lived ennuis; Ah, think not you shall finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth. It shall march forth over-mastering, till all lie beneath me, It shall stand up, the soldier of unquestioned victory."

Bassett took the book away and stood rereading the paragraph. For the first time he sensed the struggle going on at that time behind Dick's quiet face, and he wondered. Unquestioned victory, eh? That was a pretty large order.



XL

Leslie Ward had found the autumn extremely tedious. His old passion for Nina now and then flamed up in him, but her occasional coquetries no longer deceived him. They had their source only in her vanity. She exacted his embraces only as tribute to her own charm, her youth, her fresh young body.

And Nina out of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping piano, of chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing and bridge and theater boxes, was a queen dethroned. She did not read or think. She spent the leisure of her mourning period in long hours before her mirror fussing with her hair, in trimming and retrimming hats, or in the fastidious care of her hands and body.

He was ashamed sometimes of his pitilessly clear analysis of her. She was not discontented, save at the enforced somberness of their lives. She had found in marriage what she wanted; a good house, daintily served; a man to respond to her attractions as a woman, and to provide for her needs as a wife; dignity and an established place in the world; liberty and privilege.

But she was restless. She chafed at the quiet evenings they spent at home, and resented the reading in which he took refuge from her uneasy fidgeting.

"For Heaven's sake, Nina, sit down and read or sew, or do something. You've been at that window a dozen times."

"I'm not bothering you. Go on and read."

When nobody dropped in she would go upstairs and spend the hour or so before bedtime in the rites of cold cream, massage, and in placing the little combs of what Leslie had learned was called a water-wave.

But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she accepted the situation. She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked. If there were times when she wearied him, there were others when he sickened her. Across from her at the table he ate slowly and enormously. He splashed her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping cold baths. He flung his soiled clothing anywhere. He drank whisky at night and crawled into the lavender-scented sheets redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and snore until she wanted to scream. But she played the game to the limit of her ability.

Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant effort, and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet him half way. They played two-handed card games. He read aloud to her, poetry which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he hated. He suggested country walks and she agreed, to limp back after a half mile or so in her high-heeled pumps.

He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of unnumbered blank evenings. He had formerly taken an occasional evening at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would fill with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again. And in his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.

He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there were times when he knew he lied to himself. One fiction, however, he persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly. It was only that she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home, companionship and quiet intelligent talk. She had been restful. Nina was never restful.

He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. "The Valley" had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run. The reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it. But he never carried the paper home.

He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York. He would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months, however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.

But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going, and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy, surmised even that.

That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past, he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have anything to do with Dick if he turned up.

"He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead," he said to Nina, "and he'll come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just fool enough to fall for it."

"I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are."

Before her appraising eyes his own fell.

"Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a story, would you believe it?"

"No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to need any excuse."

But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough. They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions. What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him the savor and interest of the clandestine.

He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his desire to see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was demonstrating to himself that his adventurous love life was not necessarily ended; never acknowledged that the instinct of the hunter was as alive in him as in the days before his marriage. Partly, then, a desire for adventure, partly a hope that romance was not over but might still be waiting around the next corner, was behind his desire to see her again.

Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had taken to reading poetry, for instance. Certain it is that when he began, early in October, to throw out small tentative remarks about the necessity of a business trip before long to New York, she narrowed her eyes. She was determined to go with him, if he went at all, and he was equally determined that she should not.

It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides. Then there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie took up the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the pattern. It happened to be on the same evening as Dick's return to the old house.

He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.

"Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?" he asked. He was lighting a cigarette at the time.

"Yes. Why?"

"I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow. I wanted Joe to go alone, but he thinks he needs me." Joe was his partner. "Oh. So Joe's going?"

"That's what I said."

She was silent. Joe's going was clever of him. It gave authenticity to his business, and it kept her at home.

"How long shall you be gone?"

"Only a day or two." He could not entirely keep the relief out of his voice. It had been easy, incredibly easy. He might have done it a month ago. And he had told the truth; Joe was going.

"I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning."

"If you'll get your things out I'll pack them." She was still thinking, but her tone was indifferent. "You won't want your dress clothes, of course."

"I'd better have a dinner suit."

She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile. "Yes," she said slowly. "I suppose you will. You'll be going to the theater."

He glanced away.

"Possibly. But we'll be rushing to get through. There's a lot to do. Amazing how business piles up when you find you're going anywhere. There won't be much time to play."

She sat before the mirror in her small dressing-room that night, ostensibly preparing for bed but actually taking stock of her situation. She had done all she could, had been faithful and loyal, had made his home attractive, had catered to his tastes and tried to like his friends, had met his needs and responded to them. And now, this. She was bewildered and frightened. How did women hold their husbands?

She found him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It was done.

He was lying on his back, with his mouth open. She felt a sudden and violent repugnance to getting into the bed beside him. Sometime in the night he would turn over and throwing his arm about her, hold her close in his sleep; and it would be purely automatic, the mechanical result of habit.

She lay on the edge of the bed and thought things over.

He had his good qualities. He was kind and affectionate to her family. He had been wonderful when Jim died, and he loved Elizabeth dearly. He was generous and open-handed. He was handsome, too, in a big, heavy way.

She began to find excuses for him. Men were always a child-like prey to some women. They were vain, and especially they were sex-vain; good looking men were a target for every sort of advance. She transferred her loathing of him to the woman she suspected of luring him away from her, and lay for hours hating her.

She saw Leslie off in the morning with a perfunctory good-bye while cold anger and suspicion seethed in her. And later she put on her hat and went home to lay the situation before her mother. Mrs. Wheeler was out, however, and she found only Elizabeth sewing by her window.

Nina threw her hat on the bed and sat down dispiritedly.

"I suppose there's no news?" she asked.

Nina watched her. She was out of patience with Elizabeth, exasperated with the world.

"Are you going to go on like this all your life?" she demanded. "Sitting by a window, waiting? For a man who ran away from you?"

"That's not true, and you know it."

"They're all alike," Nina declared recklessly. "They go along well enough, and they are all for virtue and for the home and fireside stuff, until some woman comes their way. I ought to know."

Elizabeth looked up quickly.

"Why, Nina!" she said. "You don't mean—"

"He went to New York this morning. He pretended to be going on business, but he's actually gone to see that actress. He's been mad about her for months."

"I don't believe it."

"Oh, wake up," Nina said impatiently. "The world isn't made up of good, kind, virtuous people. It's rotten. And men are all alike. Dick Livingstone and Les and all the rest—tarred with the same stick. As long as there are women like this Carlysle creature they'll fall for them. And you and I can sit at home and chew our nails and plan to keep them by us. And we can't do it."

In spite of herself a little question of doubt crept that day into Elizabeth's mind. She had always known that they had not told her all the truth; that the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick extended even to her. But she had never thought that it might include a woman. Once there, the very humility of her love for Dick was an element in favor of the idea. She had never been good enough, or wise or clever enough, for him. She was too small and unimportant to be really vital.

Dismissing the thought did no good. It came back. But because she was a healthy-minded and practical person she took the one course she could think of, and put the question that night to her father, when he came back from seeing David.

David had sent for him early in the evening. All day he had thought over the situation between Dick and Elizabeth, with growing pain and uneasiness. He had not spoken of it to Lucy, or to Harrison Miller; he knew that they would not understand, and that Lucy would suffer. She was bewildered enough by Dick's departure.

At noon he had insisted on getting up and being helped into his trousers. So clad he felt more of a man and better able to cope with things, although his satisfaction in them was somewhat modified by the knowledge of two safety-pins at the sides, to take up their superfluous girth at the waistband.

But even the sense of being clothed as a man again did not make it easier to say to Walter Wheeler what must be said.

Walter took the news of Dick's return with a visible brightening. It was as though, out of the wreckage of his middle years, he saw that there was now some salvage, but he was grave and inarticulate over it, wrung David's hand and only said:

"Thank God for it, David." And after a pause: "Was he all right? He remembered everything?"

But something strange in the situation began to obtrude itself into his mind. Dick had come back twenty-four hours ago. Last night. And all this time—

"Where is he now?"

"He's not here, Walter."

"He has gone away again, without seeing Elizabeth?"

David cleared his throat.

"He is still a fugitive. He doesn't himself know he isn't guilty. I think he feels that he ought not to see her until—"

"Come, come," Walter Wheeler said impatiently. "Don't try to find excuses for him. Let's have the truth, David. I guess I can stand it."

Poor David, divided between his love for Dick and his native honesty, threw out his hands.

"I don't understand it, Wheeler," he said. "You and I wouldn't, I suppose. We are not the sort to lose the world for a woman. The plain truth is that there is not a trace of Judson Clark in him to-day, save one. That's the woman."

When Wheeler said nothing, but sat twisting his hat in his hands, David went on. It might be only a phase. As its impression on Dick's youth had been deeper than others, so its effect was more lasting. It might gradually disappear. He was confident, indeed, that it would. He had been reading on the subject all day.

Walter Wheeler hardly heard him. He was facing the incredible fact, and struggling with his own problem. After a time he got up, shook hands with David and went home, the dog at his heels.

During the evening that followed he made his resolution, not to tell her, never to let her suspect the truth. But he began to wonder if she had heard something, for he found her eyes on him more than once, and when Margaret had gone up to bed she came over and sat on the arm of his chair. She said an odd thing then, and one that made it impossible to lie to her later.

"I come to you, a good bit as I would go to God, if he were a person," she said. "I have got to know something, and you can tell me."

He put his arm around her and held her close.

"Go ahead, honey."

"Daddy, do you realize that I am a woman now?"

"I try to. But it seems about six months since I was feeding you hot water for colic."

She sat still for a moment, stroking his hair and being very careful not to spoil his neat parting.

"You have never told me all about Dick, daddy. You have always kept something back. That's true, isn't it?"

"There were details," he said uncomfortably. "It wasn't necessary—"

"Here's what I want to know. If he has gone back to the time—you know, wouldn't he go back to caring for the people he loved then?" Then, suddenly, her childish appeal ceased, and she slid from the chair and stood before him. "I must know, father. I can bear it. The thing you have been keeping from me was another woman, wasn't it?"

"It was so long ago," he temporized. "Think of it, Elizabeth. A boy of twenty-one or so."

"Then there was?"

"I believe so, at one time. But I know positively that he hadn't seen or heard from her in ten years."

"What sort of woman?"

"I wouldn't think about it, honey. It's all so long ago."

"Did she live in Wyoming?"

"She was an actress," he said, hard driven by her persistence.

"Do you know her name?"

"Only her stage name, honey."

"But you know she was an actress!"

He sighed.

"All right, dear," he said. "I'll tell you all I know. She was an actress, and she married another man. That's all there is to it. She's not young now. She must be thirty now—if she's living," he added, as an afterthought.

It was some time before she spoke again.

"I suppose she was beautiful," she said slowly.

"I don't know. Most of them aren't, off the stage. Anyhow, what does it matter now?"

"Only that I know he has gone back to her. And you know it too."

He heard her going quietly out of the room.

Long after, he closed the house and went cautiously upstairs. She was waiting for him in the doorway of her room, in her nightgown.

"I know it all now," she said steadily. "It was because of her he shot the other man, wasn't it?"

She saw her answer in his startled face, and closed her door quickly. He stood outside, and then he tapped lightly.

"Let me in, honey," he said. "I want to finish it. You've got a wrong idea about it."

When she did not answer he tried the door, but it was locked. He turned and went downstairs again...

When he came home the next afternoon Margaret met him in the hall.

"She knows it, Walter."

"Knows what?"

"Knows he was back here and didn't see her. Annie blurted it out; she'd got it from the Oglethorpe's laundress. Mr. Oglethorpe saw him on the street."

It took him some time to drag a coherent story from her. Annie had told Elizabeth in her room, and then had told Margaret. She had gone to Elizabeth at once, to see what she could do, but Elizabeth had been in her closet, digging among her clothes. She had got out her best frock and put it on, while her mother sat on the bed not even daring to broach the matter in her mind, and had gone out. There was a sort of cold determination in her that frightened Margaret. She had laughed a good bit, for one thing.

"She's terribly proud," she finished. "She'll do something reckless, I'm sure. It wouldn't surprise me to see her come back engaged to Wallie Sayre. I think that's where she went."

But apparently she had not, or if she had she said nothing about it. From that time on they saw a change in her; she was as loving as ever, but she affected a sort of painful brightness that was a little hard. As though she had clad herself in armor against further suffering.



XLI

For months Beverly Carlysle had remained a remote and semi-mysterious figure. She had been in some hearts and in many minds, but to most of them she was a name only. She had been the motive behind events she never heard of, the quiet center in a tornado of emotions that circled about without touching her.

On the whole she found her life, with the settling down of the piece to a successful, run, one of prosperous monotony. She had re-opened and was living in the 56th Street house, keeping a simple establishment of cook, butler and maid, and in the early fall she added a town car and a driver. After that she drove out every afternoon except on matinee days, almost always alone, but sometimes with a young girl from the company.

She was very lonely. The kaleidoscope that is theatrical New York had altered since she left it. Only one or two of her former friends remained, and she found them uninteresting and narrow with the narrowness of their own absorbing world. She had forgotten that the theater was like an island, cut off from the rest of the world, having its own politics, its own society divided by caste, almost its own religion. Out of its insularity it made occasional excursions to dinners and week-ends; even into marriage, now and then with an outlander. But almost always it went back, eager for its home of dressing-room and footlights, of stage entrances up dirty alleys, of door-keepers and managers and parts and costumes.

Occasionally she had callers, men she had met or who were brought to see her. She saw them over a tea-table, judged them remorselessly, and eliminated gradually all but one or two. She watched her dignity and her reputation with the care of an ambitious woman trying to live down the past, and she succeeded measurably well. Now and then a critic spoke of her as a second Maude Adams, and those notices she kept and treasured.

But she was always uneasy. Never since the night he had seen Judson Clark in the theater had they rung up without her brother having carefully combed the house with his eyes. She knew her limitations; they would have to ring down if she ever saw him over the footlights. And the season had brought its incidents, to connect her with the past. One night Gregory had come back and told her Jean Melis was in the balcony.

The valet was older and heavier, but he had recognized him.

"Did he see you?" was her first question.

"Yes. What about it? He never saw me but once, and that was at night and out of doors."

"Sometimes I think I can't stand it, Fred. The eternal suspense, the waiting for something to happen."

"If anything was going to happen it would have happened months ago. Bassett has given it up. And Jud's dead. Even Wilkins knows that."

She turned on him angrily.

"You haven't a heart, have you? You're glad he's dead."

"Not at all. As long as he kept under cover he was all right. But if he is, I don't see why you should fool yourself into thinking you're sorry. It's the best solution to a number of things."

"What do you suppose brought Jean Melis here?"

"What? To see the best play in New York. Besides, why not allow the man a healthy curiosity? He was pretty closely connected with a hectic part of your life, my dear. Now buck up, and for the Lord's sake forget the Frenchman. He's got nothing."

"He saw me that night, on the stairs. He never took his eyes off me at the inquest."

She gave, however, an excellent performance that night, and nothing more was heard of the valet.

There were other alarms, all of them without foundation. She went on her way, rejected an offer or two of marriage, spent her mornings in bed and her afternoons driving or in the hands of her hair-dresser and manicure, cared for the flowers that came in long casket-like boxes, and began to feel a sense of security again. She did not intend to marry, or to become interested in any one man.

She had hardly given a thought to Leslie Ward. He had come and gone, one of that steady procession of men, mostly married, who battered their heads now and then like night beetles outside a window, against the hard glass of her ambition. Because her business was to charm, she had been charming to him. And could not always remember his name!

As the months went by she began to accept Fred's verdict that nothing was going to happen. Bassett was back and at work. Either dead or a fugitive somewhere was Judson Clark, but that thought she had to keep out of her mind. Sometimes, as the play went on, and she was able to make her solid investments out of it, she wondered if her ten years of retirement had been all the price she was to pay for his ruin; but she put that thought away too, although she never minimized her responsibility when she faced it.

But her price had been heavy at that. She was childless and alone, lavishing her aborted maternity on a brother who was living his prosperous, cheerful and not too moral life at her expense. Fred was, she knew, slightly drunk with success; he attended to his minimum of labor with the least possible effort, had an expensive apartment on the Drive, and neglected her except, when he needed money. She began to see, as other women had seen before her, that her success had, by taking away the necessity for initiative, been extremely bad for him.

That was the situation when, one night late in October, the trap of Bassett's devising began to close in. It had been raining, but in spite of that they had sold standing room to the fire limit. Having got the treasurer's report on the night's business and sent it to Beverly's dressing-room, Gregory wandered into his small, low-ceiled office under the balcony staircase, and closing the door sat down. It was the interval after the second act, and above the hum of voices outside the sound of the orchestra penetrated faintly.

He was entirely serene. He had a supper engagement after the show, he had a neat car waiting outside to take him to it, and the night's business had been extraordinary. He consulted his watch and then picked up an evening paper. A few moments later he found himself reading over and over a small notice inserted among the personals.

"Personal: Jean Melis, who was in Norada, Wyoming, during the early fall of 1911 please communicate with L 22, this office."

The orchestra was still playing outside; the silly, giggling crowds were moving back to their seats, and somewhere Jean Melis, or the friends of Jean Melis, who would tell him of it, were reading that message.

He got his hat and went out, forgetful of the neat car at the curb, of the supper engagement, of the night's business, and wandered down the street through the rain. But his first uneasiness passed quickly. He saw Bassett in the affair, and probably Clark himself, still living and tardily determined to clear his name. But if the worst came to the worst, what could they do? They could go only so far, and then they would have to quit.

It would be better, however, if they did not see Melis. Much better; there was no use involving a simple situation. And Bev could be kept out of it altogether, until it was over. Ashamed of his panic he went back to the theater, got a railway schedule and looked up trains. He should have done it long before, he recognized, have gone to Bassett in the spring. But how could he have known then that Bassett was going to make a life-work of the case?

He had only one uncertainty. Suppose that Bassett had learned about Clifton Hines?

By the time the curtain rang down on the last act he was his dapper, debonair self again, made his supper engagement, danced half the night, and even dozed a little on the way home. But he slept badly and was up early, struggling with the necessity for keeping Jean Melis out of the way.

He wondered through what formalities L 22, for instance, would have to go in order to secure a letter addressed to him? Whether he had to present a card or whether he walked in demanded his mail and went away. That thought brought another with it. Wasn't it probable that Bassett was in New York, and would call for his mail himself?

He determined finally to take the chance, claim to be L 22, and if Melis had seen the advertisement and replied, get the letter. It would be easy to square it with the valet, by saying that he had recognized him in the theater and that Miss Carlysle wished to send him a box.

He had small hope of a letter at his first call, unless the Frenchman had himself seen the notice, but his anxiety drove him early to the office. There was nothing there, but he learned one thing. He had to go through with no formalities. The clerk merely looked in a box, said "Nothing here," and went on about his business. At eleven o'clock he went back again, and after a careful scrutiny of the crowd presented himself once more.

"L 22? Here you are."

He had the letter in his hand. He had glanced at it and had thrust it deep in his pocket, when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He wheeled and faced Bassett.

"I thought I recognized that back," said the reporter, cheerfully. "Come over here, old man. I want to talk to you."

But he held to Gregory's shoulder. In a corner Bassett dropped the friendliness he had assumed for the clerk's benefit, and faced him with cold anger.

"I'll have that letter now, Gregory," he said. "And I've got a damned good notion to lodge an information against you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Forget it. I was behind you when you asked for that letter. Give it here. I want to show you something."

Suddenly, with the letter in his hand, Bassett laughed and then tore it open. There was only a sheet of blank paper inside.

"I wasn't sure you'd see it, and I didn't think you'd fall for it if you did," he observed. "But I was pretty sure you didn't want me to see Melis. Now I know it."

"Well, I didn't," Gregory said sullenly.

"Just the same, I expect to see him. The day's early yet, and that's not a common name. But I'll take darned good care you don't get any more letters from here."

"What do you think Melis can tell you, that you don't know?"

"I'll explain that to you some day," Bassett said cheerfully. "Some day when you are in a more receptive mood than you are now. The point at this moment seems to me to be, what does Melis know that you don't want me to know? I suppose you don't intend to tell me."

"Not here. You may believe it or not, Bassett, but I was going to your town to-night to see you."

"Well," Bassett said sceptically, "I've got your word for it. And I've got nothing to do all day but to listen to you."

To his proposition that they go to his hotel Gregory assented sullenly, and they moved out to find a taxicab. On the pavement, however, he held back.

"I've got a right to know something," he said, "considering what he's done to me and mine. Clark's alive, I suppose?"

"He's alive all right."

"Then I'll trade you, Bassett. I'll come over with what I know, if you'll tell me one thing. What sent him into hiding for ten years, and makes him turn up now, yelling for help?"

Bassett reflected. The offer of a statement from Gregory was valuable, but, on the other hand, he was anxious not to influence his narrative. And Gregory saw his uncertainty. He planted himself firmly on the pavement.

"How about it?" he demanded.

"I'll tell you this much, Gregory. He never meant to bring the thing up again. In a way, it's me you're up against. Not Clark. And you can be pretty sure I know what I'm doing. I've got Clark, and I've got the report of the coroner's inquest, and I'll get Melis. I'm going to get to the bottom of this if I have to dig a hole that buries me."

In a taxicab Gregory sat tense and erect, gnawing at his blond mustache. After a time he said:

"What are you after, in all this? The story, I suppose. And the money. I daresay you're not doing it for love."

Bassett surveyed him appraisingly.

"You wouldn't understand my motives if I told you. As a matter of fact, he doesn't want the money."

Gregory sneered.

"Don't kid yourself," he said. "However, as a matter of fact I don't think he'll take it. It might cost too much. Where is he? Shooting pills again?"

"You'll see him in about five minutes."

If the news was a surprise Gregory gave no evidence of it, except to comment:

"You're a capable person, aren't you? I'll bet you could tune a piano if you were put to it."

He carried the situation well, the reporter had to admit; the only evidence he gave of strain was that the hands with which he lighted a cigarette were unsteady. He surveyed the obscure hotel at which the cab stopped with a sneering smile, and settled his collar as he looked it over.

"Not advertising to the world that you're in town, I see."

"We'll do that, just as soon as we're ready. Don't worry."

The laugh he gave at that struck unpleasantly on Bassett's ears. But inside the building he lost some of his jauntiness. "Queer place to find Judson Clark," he said once.

And again:

"You'd better watch him when I go in. He may bite me."

To which Bassett grimly returned: "He's probably rather particular what he bites."

He was uneasily conscious that Gregory, while nervous and tense, was carrying the situation with a certain assurance. If he was acting it was very good acting. And that opinion was strengthened when he threw open the door and Gregory advanced into the room.

"Well, Clark," he said, coolly. "I guess you didn't expect to see me, did you?"

He made no offer to shake hands as Dick turned from the window, nor did Dick make any overtures. But there was no enmity at first in either face; Gregory was easy and assured, Dick grave, and, Bassett thought, slightly impatient. From that night in his apartment the reporter had realized that he was constantly fighting a sort of passive resistance in Dick, a determination not at any cost to involve Beverly. Behind that, too, he felt that still another battle was going on, one at which he could only guess, but which made Dick somber at times and grimly quiet always.

"I meant to look you up," was his reply to Gregory's nonchalant greeting.

"Well, your friend here did that for you," Gregory said, and smiled across at Bassett. "He has his own methods, and I'll say they're effectual."

He took off his overcoat and flung it on the bed, and threw a swift, appraising glance at Dick. It was on Dick that he was banking, not on Bassett. He hated and feared Bassett. He hated Dick, but he was not afraid of him. He lighted a cigarette and faced Dick with a malicious smile.

"So here we are, again, Jud!" he said. "But with this change, that now it's you who are the respectable member of the community, and I'm the—well, we'll call it the butterfly."

There was unmistakable insult in his tone, and Dick caught it.

"Then I take it you're still living off your sister?"

The contempt in Dick's voice whipped the color to Gregory's face and clenched his fist. But he relaxed in a moment and laughed.

"Don't worry, Bassett," he said, his eyes on Dick. "We haven't any reason to like each other, but he's bigger than I am. I won't hit him." Then he hardened his voice. "But I'll remind you, Clark, that personally I don't give a God-damn whether you swing or not. Also that I can keep my mouth shut, walk out of here, and have you in quod in the next hour, if I decide to."

"But you won't," Bassett said smoothly. "You won't, any more than you did it last spring, when you sent that little letter of yours to David Livingstone."

"No. You're right. I won't. But if I tell you what I came here to say, Bassett, get this straight. It's not because I'm afraid of you, or of him. Donaldson's dead. What value would Melis's testimony have after ten years, if you put him on the stand? It's not that. It's because you'll put your blundering foot into it and ruin Bev's career, unless I tell you the truth."

It was to Bassett then that he told his story, he and Bassett sitting, Dick standing with his elbow on the mantelpiece, tall and weary and almost detached.

"I've got to make my own position plain in this," he said. "I didn't like Clark, and I kept her from marrying him. There was one time, before she met Lucas, when she almost did it. I was away when she decided on that fool trip to the Clark ranch. We couldn't get a New York theater until November, and she had some time, so they went. I've got her story of what happened there. You can check it up with what you know."

He turned to Dick for a moment.

"You were drinking pretty hard that night, but you may remember this: She had quarreled with Lucas at dinner that night and with you. That's true, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"She went to her room and began to pack her things. Then she thought it over, and she decided to try to persuade Lucas to go too. Things had begun all right, but they were getting strained and unpleasant. She went down the stairs, and Melis saw her, the valet. The living-room was dark, but there was a light coming through the billiard room door, and against it she saw the figure of a man in the doorway. He had his back to her, and he had a revolver in his hand. She ran across the room when he heard her and when he turned she saw it was Lucas. Do you remember, Jud, having a revolver and Lucas taking it from you?"

"No. Donaldson testified I'd had a revolver."

"Well, that's how we figure he'd got the gun. She thought at once that Lucas and you had quarreled, and that he was going to shoot. She tried to take it from him, but he was drunk and stubborn. It went off and killed him."

Bassett leaned forward.

"That's straight, is it?"

"I'm telling you."

"Then why in God's name didn't she say that at the inquest?"

"She was afraid it wouldn't be believed. Look at the facts. She'd quarreled with Lucas. There had been a notorious situation with regard to Clark. And remember this. She had done it. I know her well enough, however, to say that she would have confessed, eventually, but Clark had beaten it. It was reasonably sure that he was lost in the blizzard. You've got to allow for that."

Bassett said nothing. After a silence Dick spoke:

"What about the revolver?"

"She had it in her hand. She dropped it and stood still, too stunned to scream. Lucas, she says, took a step or two forward, and fell through the doorway. Donaldson came running in, and you know the rest."

Bassett was the first to break the silence.

"She will be willing to testify to that now, of course?"

"And stand trial?"

"Not necessarily. Clark would be on trial. He's been indicted. He has to be tried."

"Why does he have to be tried? He's free now. He's been free for ten years. And I tell you as an honest opinion that the thing would kill her. Accident and all, she did it. And there would be some who'd never believe she hadn't tired of Lucas, and wanted the Clark money."

"That's a chance she'll have to take," Bassett said doggedly. "The only living witness who could be called would be the valet. And remember this: for ten years he has believed that she did it. He'll have built up a story by this time, perhaps unconsciously, that might damn her."

Dick moved.

"There's only one thing to do. You're right, Gregory. I'll never expose her to that."

"You're crazy," Bassett said angrily.

"Not at all. I told you I wouldn't hide behind a woman. As a matter of fact, I've learned what I wanted. Lucas wasn't murdered. I didn't shoot him. That's what really matters. I'm no worse off than I was before; considerably better, in fact. And I don't see what's to be gained by going any further."

In spite of his protests, Bassett was compelled finally to agree. He was sulky and dispirited. He saw the profound anticlimax to all his effort of Dick wandering out again, legally dead and legally guilty, and he swore roundly under his breath.

"All right," he grunted at last. "I guess that's the last word, Gregory. But you tell her from me that if she doesn't reopen the matter of her own accord, she'll have a man's life on her conscience."

"I'll not tell her anything about it. I'm not only her brother; I'm her manager now. And I'm not kicking any hole in the boat that floats me."

He was self-confident and slightly insolent; the hands with which he lighted a fresh cigarette no longer trembled, and the glance he threw at Dick was triumphant and hostile.

"As a man sows, Clark!" he said. "You sowed hell for a number of people once."

Bassett had to restrain an impulse to kick him out of the door. When he had gone Bassett turned to Dick with assumed lightness.

"Well," he said, "here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go!"

He wandered around the room, restless and disappointed. He knew, and Dick knew, that they had come to the end of the road, and that nothing lay beyond. In his own unpleasant way Fred Gregory had made a case for his sister that tied their hands, and the crux of the matter had lain in his final gibe: "As a man sows, Clark, so shall he reap." The moral issue was there.

"I suppose the Hines story goes by the board, eh?" he commented after a pause.

"Yes. Except that I wish I'd known about him when I could have done something. He's my half-brother, any way you look at it, and he had a rotten deal. Sometimes a man sows," he added, with a wry smile, "and the other fellow reaps."

Bassett went out after that, going to the office on the chance of a letter from Melis, but there was none. When he came back he found Dick standing over a partially packed suitcase, and knew that they had come to the end of the road indeed.

"What's the next step?" he asked bluntly.

"I'll have to leave here. It's too expensive."

"And after that, what?"

"I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere. I can grow a beard-that's the usual thing, isn't it?"

Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor. "It's incredible," he said. "It's monstrous. It's a joke. Here you are, without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet's coffin between heaven and earth. It makes me sick."

He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22 forwarded, but without much hope. His last clutch of Dick's hand had a sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him most of the way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that saw him off with a smile.

By the next afternoon's mail he received a note from New York, with a few words of comment penciled on it in Dick's writing. "This came this evening. I sent back the money. D." The note was from Gregory and had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill. It began without superscription: "Enclosed find a hundred dollars, as I imagine funds may be short. If I were you I'd get out of here. There has been considerable excitement, and you know too many people in this burg."

Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.

"Now why the devil did he do that?" he reflected. He sat for some time, thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion. The story Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely calculated to shut off all further inquiry. They had had ten years; ten years to plan, eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare their defense, in case Clark turned up. Wasn't that why Gregory had been so assured? But he had not been content to let well enough alone; he had perhaps overreached himself.

Then what was the answer? She had killed Lucas, but was it an accident? And there must have been a witness, or they would have had nothing to fear. He wrote out on a bit of paper three names, and sat looking at them:

Hattie Thorwald Jean Melis Clifton Hines.



XLII

Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart. On the evening of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen her, she deliberately killed her love and decently interred it. She burned her notes and his one letter and put away her ring, performing the rites not as rites but as a shameful business to be done with quickly. She tore his photograph into bits and threw them into her waste basket, and having thus housecleaned her room set to work to houseclean her heart.

She found very little to do. She was numb and totally without feeling. The little painful constriction in her chest which had so often come lately with her thoughts of him was gone. She felt extraordinarily empty, but not light, and her feet dragged about the room.

She felt no sense of Dick's unworthiness, but simply that she was up against something she could not fight, and no longer wanted to fight. She was beaten, but the strange thing was that she did not care. Only, she would not be pitied. As the days went on she resented the pity that had kept her in ignorance for so long, and had let her wear her heart on her sleeve; and she even wondered sometimes whether the story of Dick's loss of memory had not been false, evolved out of that pity and the desire to save her pain.

David sent for her, but she wrote him a little note, formal and restrained. She would come in a day or two, but now she must get her bearings. He was, to know that she was not angry, and felt it all for the best, and she was very lovingly his, Elizabeth.

She knew now that she would eventually marry Wallie Sayre if only to get away from pity. He would have to know the truth about her, that she did not love any one; not even her father and her mother. She pretended to care for fear of hurting them, but she was actually frozen quite hard. She did not believe in love. It was a terrible thing, to be avoided by any one who wanted to get along, and this avoiding was really quite simple. One simply stopped feeling.

On the Sunday after she had come to this comfortable knowledge she sat in the church as usual, in the choir stalls, and suddenly she hated the church. She hated the way the larynx of Henry Wallace, the tenor, stuck out like a crabapple over his low collar. She hated the fat double chin of the bass. She hated the talk about love and the certain rewards of virtue, and the faces of the congregation, smug and sure of salvation.

She went to the choir master after the service to hand in her resignation. And did not, because it had occurred to her that it might look, to use Nina's word, as though she were crushed. Crushed! That was funny.

Wallie Sayre was waiting for her outside, and she went up with him to lunch, and afterwards they played golf. They had rather an amusing game, and once she had to sit down on a bunker and laugh until she was weak, while he fought his way out of a pit. Crushed, indeed!

So the weaving went on, almost completed now. With Wallie Sayre biding his time, but fairly sure of the result. With Jean Melis happening on a two-days' old paper, and reading over and over a notice addressed to him. With Leslie Ward, neither better nor worse than his kind, seeking adventure in a bypath, which was East 56th Street. And with Dick wandering the streets of New York after twilight, and standing once with his coat collar turned up against the rain outside of the Metropolitan Club, where the great painting of his father hung over a mantelpiece.

Now that he was near Beverly, Dick hesitated to see her. He felt no resentment at her long silence, nor at his exile which had resulted from it. He made excuses for her, recognized his own contribution to the catastrophe, knew, too, that nothing was to be gained by seeing her again. But he determined finally to see her once more, and then to go away, leaving her to peace and to success.

She would know now that she had nothing to fear from him. All he wanted was to satisfy the hunger that was in him by seeing her, and then to go away.

Curiously, that hunger to see her had been in abeyance while Bassett was with him. It was only when he was alone again that it came up; and although he knew that, he was unconscious of another fact, that every word, every picture of her on the great boardings which walled in every empty lot, everything, indeed, which brought her into the reality of the present, loosened by so much her hold on him out of the past.

When he finally went to the 56th Street house it was on impulse. He had meant to pass it, but he found himself stopping, and half angrily made his determination. He would follow the cursed thing through now and get it over. Perhaps he had discounted it too much in advance, waited too long, hoped too much. Perhaps it was simply that that last phase was already passing. But he felt no thrill, no expectancy, as he rang the bell and was admitted to the familiar hall.

It was peopled with ghosts, for him. Upstairs, in the drawing-room that extended across the front of the house, she had told him of her engagement to Howard Lucas. Later on, coming back from Europe, he had gone back there to find Lucas installed in the house, his cigars on the table, his photographs on the piano, his books scattered about. And Lucas himself, smiling, handsome and triumphant on the hearth rug, dressed for dinner except for a brocaded dressing-gown, putting his hand familiarly on Beverly's shoulder, and calling her "old girl."

He wandered into the small room to the right of the hall, where in other days he had waited to be taken upstairs, and stood looking out of the window. He heard some one, a caller, come down, get into his overcoat in the hall and go out, but he was not interested. He did not know that Leslie Ward had stood outside the door for a minute, had seen and recognized him, and had then slammed out.

He was quite steady as the butler preceded him up the stairs. He even noticed certain changes in the house, the door at the landing converted into an arch, leaded glass in the dining-room windows beyond it. But he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and saw himself a shabby contrast to the former days.

He faced her, still with that unexpected composure, and he saw her very little changed. Even the movement with which she came toward him with both hands out was familiar.

"Jud!" she said. "Oh, my dear!"

He saw that she was profoundly moved, and suddenly he was sorry for her. Sorry for the years behind them both, for the burden she had carried, for the tears in her eyes.

"Dear old Bev!" he said.

She put her head against his shoulder, and cried unrestrainedly; and he held her there, saying small, gentle, soothing things, smoothing her hair. But all the time he knew that life had been playing him another trick; he felt a great tenderness for her and profound pity, but he did not love her, or want her. He saw that after all the suffering and waiting, the death and exile, he was left at the end with nothing. Nothing at all.

When she was restored to a sort of tense composure he found to his discomfort that woman-like she intended to abase herself thoroughly and completely. She implored his forgiveness for his long exile, gazing at him humbly, and when he said in a matter-of-fact tone that he had been happy, giving him a look which showed that she thought he was lying to save her unhappiness.

"You are trying to make it easier for me. But I know, Jud."

"I'm telling you the truth," he said, patiently. "There's one point I didn't think necessary to tell your brother. For a good while I didn't remember anything about it. If it hadn't been for that-well, I don't know. Anyhow, don't look at me as though I willfully saved you. I didn't."

She sat still, pondering that, and twisting a ring on her finger.

"What do you mean to do?" she asked, after a pause.

"I don't know. I'll find something."

"You won't go back to your work?"

"I don't see how I can. I'm in hiding, in a sort of casual fashion."

To his intense discomfiture she began to cry again. She couldn't go through with it. She would go back to Norada and tell the whole thing. She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't do it. But for the first time he felt that in this one thing she was not sincere. Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but now he felt she was acting.

"Suppose we don't go into that now," he said gently. "You've had about all you can stand." He got up awkwardly. "I suppose you are playing to-night?"

She nodded, looking up at him dumbly.

"Better lie down, then, and—forget me." He smiled down at her.

"I've never forgotten you, Jud. And now, seeing you again—I—"

Her face worked. She continued to look up at him, piteously. The appalling truth came to him then, and that part of him which had remained detached and aloof, watching, almost smiled at the irony. She cared for him. Out of her memories she had built up something to care for, something no more himself than she was the woman of his dreams; but with this difference, that she was clinging, woman-fashion, to the thing she had built, and he had watched it crumble before his eyes.

"Will you promise to go and rest?"

"Yes. If you say so."

She was acquiescent and humble. Her eyes were soft, faithful, childlike.

"I've suffered so, Jud."

"I know."

"You don't hate me, do you?"

"Why should I? Just remember this: while you were carrying this burden, I was happier than I'd ever been. I'll tell you about it some time."

She got up, and he perceived that she expected him again to take her in his arms. He felt ridiculous and resentful, and rather as though he was expected to kiss the hand that had beaten him, but when she came close to him he put an arm around her shoulders.

"Poor Bev!" he said. "We've made pretty much a mess of it, haven't we?"

He patted her and let her go, and her eyes followed him as he left the room. The elder brotherliness of that embrace had told her the truth as he could never have hurt her in words. She went back to the chair where he had sat, and leaned her cheek against it.

After a time she went slowly upstairs and into her room. When her maid came in she found her before the mirror of her dressing-table, staring at her reflection with hard, appraising eyes.

Leslie's partner, wandering into the hotel at six o'clock, found from the disordered condition of the room that Leslie had been back, had apparently bathed, shaved and made a careful toilet, and gone out again. Joe found himself unexpectedly at a loose end. Filled, with suppressed indignation he commenced to dress, getting out a shirt, hunting his evening studs, and lining up what he meant to say to Leslie over his defection.

Then, at a quarter to seven, Leslie came in, top-hatted and morning-coated, with a yellowing gardenia in his buttonhole and his shoes covered with dust.

"Hello, Les," Joe said, glancing up from a laborious struggle with a stud. "Been to a wedding?"

"Why?"

"You look like it."

"I made a call, and since then I've been walking."

"Some walk, I'd say," Joe observed, looking at him shrewdly. "What's wrong, Les? Fair one turn you down?"

"Go to hell," Leslie said irritably.

He flung off his coat and jerked at his tie. Then, with it hanging loose, he turned to Joe.

"I'm going to tell you something. I know it's safe with you, and I need some advice. I called on a woman this afternoon. You know who she is. Beverly Carlysle."

Joe whistled softly.

"That's not the point," Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice. "I'm not defending myself. She's a friend; I've got a right to call there if I want to."

"Sure you have," soothed Joe.

"Well, you know the situation at home, and who Livingstone actually is. The point is that, while that poor kid at home is sitting around killing herself with grief, Clark's gone back to her. To Beverly Carlysle."

"How do you know?"

"Know? I saw him this afternoon, at her house."

He sat still, moodily reviewing the situation. His thoughts were a chaotic and unpleasant mixture of jealousy, fear of Nina, anxiety over Elizabeth, and the sense of a lost romantic adventure. After a while he got up.

"She's a nice kid," he said. "I'm fond of her. And I don't know what to do."

Suddenly Joe grinned.

"I see," he said. "And you can't tell her, or the family, where you saw him!"

"Not without raising the deuce of a row."

He began, automatically, to dress for dinner. Joe moved around the room, rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and produced a bottle of gin from his bag. Leslie did not hear him, nor the later preparation of the cocktails. He was reflecting bitterly on the fact that a man who married built himself a wall against romance, a wall, compounded of his own new sense of responsibility, of family ties, and fear.

Joe brought him a cocktail.

"Drink it, old dear," he said. "And when it's down I'll tell you a few little things about playing around with ladies who have a past. Here's to forgetting 'em."

Leslie took the glass.

"Right-o," he said.

He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business in New York. His going rather resembled a flight. Tossing sleepless the night before, he had found what many a man had discovered before him, that his love of clandestine adventure was not as strong as his caution. He had had a shock. True, his affair with Beverly had been a formless thing, a matter of imagination and a desire to assure himself that romance, for him, was not yet dead. True, too, that he had nothing to fear from Dick Livingstone. But the encounter had brought home to him the danger of this old-new game he was playing. He was running like a frightened child.

He thought of various plans. One of them was to tell Nina the truth, take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr. Wheeler. One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his humiliating admission. But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas, was uncompromising in rectitude, and would understand as only a man could that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful, he had been actuated by at least subconscious desire.

His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need have been, perhaps more self-conscious. And he genuinely cared for Elizabeth. It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that lay behind his ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion was both wilful and cruel.

Yet, when the time came, he found it hard to tell her. He took her for a drive one evening soon after his return, forcibly driving off Wallie Sayre to do so, and eying surreptitiously now and then her pale, rather set face. He found a quiet lane and stopped the car there, and then turned and faced her.

"How've you been, little sister, while I've been wandering the gay white way?" he asked.

"I've been all right, Leslie."

"Not quite all right, I think. Have you ever thought, Elizabeth, that no man on earth is worth what you've been going through?"

"I'm all right, I tell you," she said impatiently. "I'm not grieving any more. That's the truth, Les. I know now that he doesn't intend to come back, and I don't care. I never even think about him, now."

"I see," he said. "Well, that's that."

But he had not counted on her intuition, and was startled to hear her say:

"Well? Go on."

"What do you mean, go on?"

"You brought me out here to tell me something."

"Not at all. I simply—"

"Where is he? You've seen him."

He tried to meet her eyes, failed, cursed himself for a fool. "He's alive and well, Elizabeth. I saw him in New York." It was a full minute before she spoke again, and then her lips were stiff and her voice strained.

"Has he gone back to her? To the actress he used to care for?"

He hesitated, but he knew he would have to go on.

"I'm going to tell you something, Elizabeth. It's not very creditable to me, but I'll have to trust you. I don't want to see you wasting your life. You've got plenty of courage and a lot of spirit. And you've got to forget him."

He told her, and then he took her home. He was a little frightened, for there was something not like her in the way she had taken it, a sort of immobility that might, he thought, cover heartbreak. But she smiled when she thanked him, and went very calmly into the house.

That night she accepted Wallie Sayre.



XLIII

Bassett was having a visitor. He sat in his chair while that visitor ranged excitedly up and down the room, a short stout man, well dressed and with a mixture of servility and importance. The valet's first words, as he stood inside the door, had been significant.

"I should like to know, first, if I am talking to the police."

"No—and yes," Bassett said genially. "Come and sit down, man. What I mean is this. I am a friend of Judson Clark's, and this may or may not be a police matter. I don't know yet."

"You are a friend of Mr. Clark's? Then the report was correct. He is still alive, sir?"

"Yes."

The valet got out a handkerchief and wiped his face. He was clearly moved.

"I am glad of that. Very glad. I saw some months ago, in a newspaper—where is he?"

"In New York. Now Melis, I've an idea that you know something about the crime Judson Clark was accused of. You intimated that at the inquest."

"Mrs. Lucas killed him."

"So she says," Bassett said easily.

The valet jumped and stared.

"She admits it, as the result of an accident. She also admits hiding the revolver where you found it."

"Then you do not need me."

"I'm not so sure of that."

The valet was puzzled.

"I want you to think back, Melis. You saw her go down the stairs, sometime before the shot. Later you were confident she had hidden the revolver, and you made a second search for it. Why? You hadn't heard her testimony at the inquest then. Clark had run away. Why didn't you think Clark had done it?"

"Because I thought she was having an affair with another man. I have always thought she did it."

Bassett nodded.

"I thought so. What made you think that?"

"I'll tell you. She went West without a maid, and Mr. Clark got a Swedish woman from a ranch near to look after her, a woman named Thorwald. She lived at her own place and came over every day. One night, after Mrs. Thorwald had started home, I came across her down the road near the irrigator's house, and there was a man with her. They didn't hear me behind them, and he was giving her a note for some one in the house."

"Why not for one of the servants?"

"That's what I thought then, sir. It wasn't my business. But I saw the same man later on, hanging about the place at night, and once I saw her with him—Mrs. Lucas, I mean. That was in the early evening. The gentlemen were out riding, and I'd gone with one of the maids to a hill to watch the moon rise. They were on some rocks, below in the canyon."

"Did you see him?"

"I think it was the same man, if that's what you mean. I knew something queer was going on, after that, and I watched her. She went out at night more than once. Then I told Donaldson there was somebody hanging round the place, and he set a watch."

"Fine. Now we'll go to the night Lucas was shot. Was the Thorwald woman there?"

"She had started home."

"Leaving Mrs. Lucas packing alone?"

"Yes. I hadn't thought of that. The Thorwald woman heard the shot and came back. I remember that, because she fainted upstairs and I had to carry her to a bed."

"I see. Now about the revolver."

"I located it the first time I looked for it. Donaldson and the others had searched the billiard room. So I tried the big room. It was under a chair. I left it there, and concealed myself in the room. She, Mrs. Lucas, came down late that night and hunted for it. Then she hid it where I got it later."

"I wish I knew, Melis, why you didn't bring those facts out at the inquest."

"You must remember this, sir. I had been with Mr. Clark for a long time. I knew the situation. And I thought that he had gone away that night to throw suspicion from her to himself. I was not certain what to do. I would have told it all in court, but it never came to trial."

Bassett was satisfied and fairly content. After the Frenchman's departure he sat for some time, making careful notes and studying them. Supposing the man Melis had seen to be Clifton Hines, a good many things would be cleared up. Some new element he had to have, if Gregory's story were to be disproved, some new and different motive. Suppose, for instance...

He got up and paced the floor back and forward, forward and back. There was just one possibility, and just one way of verifying it. He sat down and wrote out a long telegram and then got his hat and carried it to the telegraph office himself. He had made his last throw.

He received a reply the following day, and in a state of exhilaration bordering on madness packed his bag, and as he packed it addressed it, after the fashion of lonely men the world over.

"Just one more trip, friend cowhide," he said, "and then you and I are going to settle down again to work. But it's some trip, old arm-breaker."

He put in his pajamas and handkerchiefs, his clean socks and collars, and then he got his revolver from a drawer and added it. Just twenty-four hours later he knocked at Dick's door in a boarding-house on West Ninth Street, found it unlocked, and went in. Dick was asleep, and Bassett stood looking down at him with an odd sort of paternal affection. Finally he bent down and touched his shoulder.

"Wake up, old top," he said. "Wake up. I have some news for you."



XLIV

To Dick the last day or two had been nightmares of loneliness. He threw caution to the winds and walked hour after hour, only to find that the street crowds, people who had left a home or were going to one, depressed him and emphasized his isolation. He had deliberately put away from him the anchor that had been Elizabeth and had followed a treacherous memory, and now he was adrift. He told himself that he did not want much. Only peace, work and a place. But he had not one of them.

He was homesick for David, for Lucy, and, with a tightening of the heart he admitted it, for Elizabeth. And he had no home. He thought of Reynolds, bent over the desk in his office; he saw the quiet tree-shaded streets of the town, and Reynolds, passing from house to house in the little town, doing his work, usurping his place in the confidence and friendship of the people; he saw the very children named for him asking: "Who was I named for, mother?" He saw David and Lucy gone, and the old house abandoned, or perhaps echoing to the laughter of Reynolds' children.

He had moments when he wondered what would happen if he took Beverly at her word. Suppose she made her confession, re-opened the thing, to fill the papers with great headlines, "Judson Clark Not Guilty. A Strange Story."

He saw himself going back to the curious glances of the town, never to be to them the same as before. To face them and look them down, to hear whispers behind his back, to feel himself watched and judged, on that far past of his. Suppose even that it could be kept out of the papers; Wilkins amiable and acquiescent, Beverly's confession hidden in the ruck of legal documents; and he stealing back, to go on as best he could, covering his absence with lies, and taking up his work again. But even that uneasy road was closed to him. He saw David and Lucy stooping to new and strange hypocrisies, watching with anxious old eyes the faces of their neighbors, growing defiant and hard as time went on and suspicion still followed him.