“After this, Minnie,” she said, “we will always set Doctor Richard’s place.  Then, when he comes—­”

Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it, went back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel.  Her world was gone to pieces.  By years of service to the one family she had no other world, no home, no ties.  She was with the Livingstones, but not one of them.  Alone in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off.  She thought that David, had he not been ill, would have told her.

Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she went up she found him sitting in Dick’s room, on a stiff chair inside the door.  She stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, but he did not say anything, and she went away.

That night David had a caller.  All evening the bell had been ringing, and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with visiting cards.  There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs. Sayre.  Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who came at nine o’clock was not inclined to be turned away.

“You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow,” he said.  “I’ll wait.”

He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do so, and passed it to Minnie.  She calmly read it, and rather defiantly carried it off.  But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.

“Hang your hat on the rack and go on up.”

So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in David’s old fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with the marble top, and Dick’s picture in his uniform on the mantle.

Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed.  He was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an obviously sick man, but David’s first words reassured him.

“Come in,” he said.  “You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone at Norada?”

“Yes.  I see you know about it.”

“We know something, not everything.”  Suddenly David’s pose deserted him.  He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor.  “Is he living?” he asked, in a low voice.

“I think so.  I’m not certain.”

“Then you don’t know where he is?”

“No.  He got away—­but you know that.  Sit down, doctor.  I’ve got a long story to tell.”

“I’ll get you to call my sister first,” David said.  “And tell her to get Harrison Miller.  Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went west when my health did not permit me to go.”

While they waited David asked only one question.

“The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the doctor who saw him—­you got him, I think—­said he appeared to have been drinking heavily.  Is that true?  He was not a drinking man.”