“My head aches like the mischief,” he said, and his voice was dull and lifeless.

He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went, nevertheless.  Dick’s statement, that he meant to surrender himself, had filled him with uneasiness.  He determined, following him along the hall, to keep a close guard on him for the next few hours, but beyond that, just then, he did not try to go.  If it were humanly possible he meant to smuggle him out of the town and take him East.  But he had an uneasy conviction that Dick was going to be ill.  The mind did strange things with the body.

Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.

“My head aches like the mischief,” he repeated.  “Look in that grip and find me some tablets, will you?  I’m dizzy.”

He made an effort and stretched out on the bed.  “Good Lord,” he muttered, “I haven’t had such a headache since—­”

His voice trailed off.  Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in the corner, straightened and looked around.  Dick was suddenly asleep and breathing heavily.

For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him and trying to plan some course of action.  He was overcome by his own responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened.  That Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself when he wakened, he could no longer doubt.  His mind wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then.  He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man’s life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others.  David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all threads.

He swore in a whisper.

The maid tapped at the door.  He opened it an inch or so and sent her off.  In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger.  She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and she might have known Clark.  Just what Providence had kept him from recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on indefinitely.

After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went down to lunch.  He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the room, to think without that quiet figure before him.  Over the pretence of food he faced the situation.  Lying ready to his hand was the biggest story of his career, but he could not carry it through.  It was characteristic of him that, before abandoning it, he should follow through to the end the result of its publication.  He did not believe, for instance, that either Dick’s voluntary surrender or his own disclosure of the situation necessarily meant a conviction for murder.  To convict a man of a crime he did not know he had committed would be difficult.  But, with his customary thoroughness he followed that through also.  Livingstone acquitted was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark.  The new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone.  The story would follow him, never to be lived down.  And in his particular profession confidence and respect were half the game.  All that would be gone.