ink safe?" she asked, breathlessly. "Then he has been in danger? What
are you keeping from me?" And when no one spoke: "Oh, don't you see how
cruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me
instead."

"Not danger," her father said, slowly. "So far as we know, he is well.
Is all right." And seeing her face: "It is nothing that affects his
feeling for you, dear. He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever he
is. Only, we don't know where he is."

But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he was
discouraged and sick at heart. He went directly upstairs to his wife,
and shut the bedroom door.

"Not a trace," he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. "The
situation is as he outlined it in the letter. He elaborated, of course.
The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of his
doesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines. And
even then it's all supposition. There's a strong sentiment out there
that Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in the
mountains. The horse wandered into town last week. I'll have to tell
her."

Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair,
helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on their
young.

"It will kill her, Walter."

"She's young," he said sturdily. "She'll get over it."

But he did not think so, and she knew it.

"There is a rather queer element in it," he observed, after a time.
"Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is at
the hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after Dick that
day when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn't take the train.
He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was being
watched." But she was not interested in Bassett. The name meant nothing
to her. She harked back to the question that had been in both their
minds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David's statement.

"In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he..."

"Why?"

"My little girl, and--Judson Clark!"

But he fought that sturdily. They had ten years of knowledge and respect
to build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was Dick's return, an
end to this long waiting. There would be no reservations in his welcome,
if only--

Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting in
the library. He went like a man to his execution, and his resol