ue, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a
few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the
restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of
money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the
facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house,
and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But
David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future
depended entirely on his own efforts.

Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had
mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which
he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go
back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if
he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that
environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been
totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on,
as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at
odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been
no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the
practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should
have been.

But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a
peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more
of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship,
but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had
been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?

Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never found
himself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man who
called him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditions
as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. He
hated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.

But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a
vengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love should
bring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love,
that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also it
brought Elizabeth.

Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday
night.

"Don't be a fool," David had said. "