He went away then, and they heard the house door close.

Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home, and that David was being brought back.  She saw that telegram from Mr. Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something more ominous than either.

“Reach home Tuesday night.  Nothing definite.  Think safe.”

“Think safe?” she asked, breathlessly.  “Then he has been in danger?  What are you keeping from me?” And when no one spoke:  “Oh, don’t you see how cruel it is?  You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me instead.”

“Not danger,” her father said, slowly.  “So far as we know, he is well.  Is all right.”  And seeing her face:  “It is nothing that affects his feeling for you, dear.  He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever he is.  Only, we don’t know where he is.”

But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he was discouraged and sick at heart.  He went directly upstairs to his wife, and shut the bedroom door.

“Not a trace,” he said, in reply to the question in her eyes.  “The situation is as he outlined it in the letter.  He elaborated, of course.  The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of his doesn’t help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines.  And even then it’s all supposition.  There’s a strong sentiment out there that Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in the mountains.  The horse wandered into town last week.  I’ll have to tell her.”

Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair, helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on their young.

“It will kill her, Walter.”

“She’s young,” he said sturdily.  “She’ll get over it.”

But he did not think so, and she knew it.

“There is a rather queer element in it,” he observed, after a time.  “Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night.  His stuff is at the hotel, but no papers to identify him.  He had looked after Dick that day when he was sick, and he simply vanished.  He didn’t take the train.  He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was being watched.”  But she was not interested in Bassett.  The name meant nothing to her.  She harked back to the question that had been in both their minds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David’s statement.

“In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he...”

“Why?”

“My little girl, and—­Judson Clark!”

But he fought that sturdily.  They had ten years of knowledge and respect to build on.  The past was past.  All he prayed for was Dick’s return, an end to this long waiting.  There would be no reservations in his welcome, if only—­

Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting in the library.  He went like a man to his execution, and his resolution nearly gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair and pathetically patient.  He told her the story as guardedly as he could.  He began with Dick’s story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefully to Dick’s own feeling that he must clear up that past before he married.  She followed him carefully, bewildered a little and very tense.