Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful.  Harrison Miller rode up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs.  At the door of Dick’s room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and rigid.  He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his collar, worked convulsively.

He had got Harrison Miller’s narrative from him on the way from the station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.

“He had been in a stupor all day,” Miller related, “and was being cared for by a man named Bassett.  I daresay that’s the man Gregory had referred to.  He may have become suspicious of Bassett.  I don’t know.  But a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an alarm.  He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign of him has been found since.”

“It wasn’t Bassett who raised the alarm?”

“No, apparently not.  The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared, too, the same night.  I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn’t shown up.”

And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.

Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.

“It is my hope,” he said, “to carry on exactly as though Dick might walk in to-morrow and take his place again.  As I hold to my belief in God, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before I—­before long.  But our friends will be asking where he is and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand.  What we’d better say is simply that Dick was called away on business connected with some property in the West.  They may not believe it, but they’ll hardly disprove it.”

So the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick Livingstone’s name was arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party to it turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty and courage.  Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy gave the same explanation while she arranged David’s tray.

“He has been detained in the West on business,” Lucy said.

“He might have sent me a postcard.  And he hasn’t written Doctor Reynolds at all.”

“He has been very busy.  Get the sugar bowl, Minnie.  He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

But Minnie did not immediately move.

“He’d better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David,” she said, with twitching lips.  “And I’ll just say this, Mrs. Crosby.  The talk that’s going on in this town is something awful.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Lucy said firmly.

She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before they started away.  But before she sat down she did a touching thing.  She rang the bell and called Minnie.