“Yes.  You knew her,” Bassett said slowly.  At the intimation in his tone Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking.  His face, pale before, took on a grayish tinge.

“I wasn’t—­married to her?”

“No.  You didn’t marry her.  See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is it?  You’re not trying to put something over on me?  Because if you are, you needn’t.  I’d about made up my mind to follow the story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it.  When a man’s pulled himself out of the mud as you have it’s not my business to pull him down.  But I don’t want you to pull any bunk.”

Dick winced.

“Out of the mud!” he said.  “No.  I’m telling you the truth, Bassett.  I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and all of them, I imagine from my childhood.  I pick up at a cabin in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with a tin spoon.”  He tried to smile and failed.  His face twitched.  “I could stand it for myself,” he said, “but I’ve tied another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest.  Arrest!  For what?”

“Suppose,” Bassett said after a moment, “suppose you let that go just now, and tell me more about this—­this gap.  You’re a medical man.  You’ve probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly.  I’m accepting your statement, you see.  As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn’t be here.  But I’ve got to know what I’m doing before I lay my cards on the table.  Make it simple, if you can.  I don’t know your medical jargon.”

Dick did his best.  The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a shock.  No, there was no injury required.  He didn’t think he had had an injury.  A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough.  And fear.  It was generally fear.  He had never considered himself braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind.  Even if things hadn’t broken as they had, he’d have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been afraid of.  He paused then, to give Bassett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said:  “Go on. you put your cards on the table, and then I’ll lay mine out.”

Dick went on.  He didn’t blame Bassett.  If there was something that was in his line of work, he understood.  At the same time he wanted to save David anything unpleasant. (The word “unpleasant” startled Bassett, by its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted Bassett to know that there could never be doubt of David’s high purpose and his essential fineness.

“Whatever I was before.” he finished simply, “and I’ll get that from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work.”

He stood up and braced himself.  It had been clear to Bassett for ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of revelation.  He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself against it.