The Breaking Point

"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.