David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David, but

with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the station for

the group of friends who met him.

David had decided on a course and meant to follow it. That course was to

protect Dick's name, and to keep the place he had made in the world open

for him. Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the terror that was with

him day and night, that Dick had reached the breaking point and had gone

back. But he knew it was possible. Lauler had warned him against shocks

and trouble, and looking back David could see the gradually accumulating

pressure against that mental wall of Dick's subconscious building;

overwork and David's illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy,

and coming on top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the

knowledge that he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law. The work

of ten years perhaps undone.

Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful. Harrison Miller rode

up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David

walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs. At the door of

Dick's room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and

rigid. He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went

on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but

the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his

collar, worked convulsively.

He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the

station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.

"He had been in a stupor all day," Miller related, "and was being

cared for by a man named Bassett. I daresay that's the man Gregory had

referred to. He may have become suspicious of Bassett. I don't know. But

a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an

alarm. He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign

of him has been found since."

"It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?"

"No, apparently not. The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared,

too, the same night. I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't

shown up."

And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.

Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David

called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.




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