en: _Getting badly bored and losing grip fast. Come pull me out.
Opdyke._ That's all, Ramsdell. Send it off, to-night."

Next afternoon, Whittenden came, to all seeming the same unspoiled,
curly-headed youngster who had helped to open Brenton's eyes, so long
ago, to the real good there was in life, despite the melancholy
teachings of his early Calvinism. The professor was busy with a class,
Mrs. Opdyke had a cold; and so it came about that Olive, dropping in,
that morning, and hearing of the dilemma, offered to drive down to meet
the guest.

"You always were a comfort, Olive," Reed assured her gratefully.
"You've a general-utility sort of disposition that seems to balk at
nothing, and therefore we all impose upon you. Sure you don't mind? You
can't miss Whittenden. I've told you too many things about him, and he
looks exactly the sort of man he is."

Olive did not miss him. More than that, she used the fifteen minutes of
their drive together to impress upon the guest's mind the salient facts
of Reed's history during the past eleven months, facts largely of the
spirit, not a mere physical chronology.

"And the worst of it all is," she said, as she drew up at the Opdyke
gate; "we none of us, however much we care for him, however hard we
try, can get inside the situation and share it with him. He is bound to
go through it, all alone. That is the most maddening phase of the whole
thing."

But Whittenden, looking into her brown eyes, had his doubts of that.
Before he went to bed, that night, his doubts were even greater.

As a matter of fact, neither Reed Opdyke nor his guest slept very much,
that night. Indeed, they scarcely went to bed at all. Ramsdell, dozing
in the next room, fully dressed, to be in call when Opdyke needed to be
put into bed, had a hazy idea that the evening was eighteen hours long
and that both the men talked throughout it, without pause. The truth of
the matter was, however, that the pauses were both long and frequent,
those quiet times which come across a conversation full of mutual
understanding. At the start, there had been a good deal to say on both
sides. It was the first time the two men had met since Opdyke's
accident; an experience such as that can never fully be explained by
letters, especially when, on one side, the letters have to be dictated
to a man like Ramsdell, sounder of heart than of orthography. Reed
slurred over most of the details of the accident, even now. What he did
not s