It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology.  Not that he had worried about the new psychology in those early days.  He had been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious.  It had been too much trouble even to think.

True, 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.  “Go ahead and take her, if she’ll have you.  And don’t be too long about it.  I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“What I feel,” he had replied, “is this:  I don’t know, of course, if she cares.”  David had grunted.  “I do know I’m going to try to make her care, if it—­if it’s humanly possible.  But I’d like to go back to the ranch again, David, before things go any further.”