pstairs, leaned over the railing to see if
there were any indications of departure. The door was open, and Mrs.
Sayre evidently about to take her leave. She was saying:

"It's very close to my heart, Nina dear, and I know you will be tactful.
I haven't stressed the material advantages, but you might point them out
to her."

A few moments later Leslie came downstairs. Nina was sitting alone,
thinking, with a not entirely pleasant look of calculation on her face.

"Well?" he said. "What were you two plotting?"

"Plotting? Nothing, of course."

He looked down at her. "Now see here, old girl," he said, "you keep your
hands off Elizabeth's affairs. If I know anything she's making a damn
good choice, and don't you forget it."

XVIII

Dick stood with the letter in his hand, staring at it. Who was Bassett?
Who was "G"? What had the departure of whoever Bassett might be for
Norada to do with David? And who was the person who was to be got out of
town?

He did not go upstairs. He took the letter into his private office,
closed the door, and sitting down at his desk turned his reading lamp on
it, as though that physical act might bring some mental light.

Reread, the cryptic sentences began to take on meaning. An unknown named
Bassett, whoever he might be, was going to Norada bent on "mischief,"
and another unknown who signed himself "G" was warning David of that
fact. But the mischief was designed, not against David, but against a
third unknown, some one who was to be got out of town.

David had been trying to get him out of town.--The warning referred to
himself.

His first impulse was to go to David, and months later he was to wonder
what would have happened had he done so. How far could Bassett have
gone? What would have been his own decision when he learned the truth?

For a little while, then, the shuttle was in Dick's own hand. He went up
to David's room, and with his hand on the letter in his pocket, carried
on behind his casual talk the debate that was so vital. But David had
a headache and a slightly faster pulse, and that portion of the pattern
was never woven.

The association between anxiety and David's illness had always been
apparent in Dick's mind, but now he began to surmise a concrete shock, a
person, a telegram, or a telephone call. And after dinner that night he
went back to the kitchen.

"Minnie," he inquired, "do you remember the afternoon Doctor David was
taken sick?"

"I'll never f