“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.”
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 forget it.”
“Did he receive a telegram that day?”
“Not that I know of. He often answers
the bell himself.”
“Do you know whether he had a visitor, just
before you heard him fall?”
“He had a patient, yes. A man.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. He was a stranger
to me.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
Minnie reflected.
“He was a smallish man, maybe thirty-five or
so,” she said. “I think he had gaiters
over his shoes, or maybe light tops. He was a
nice appearing person.”
