“Another girl, you mean?”

“Yes.  Some one he knew before.”

Nina was watching her.  Sometimes she almost burst with the drama she was suppressing.  She had been a small girl when Judson Clark had disappeared, but even at twelve she had known something of the story.  She wanted frantically to go about the village and say to them:  “Do you know who has been living here, whom you used to patronize?  Judson Clark, one of the richest men in the world!” She built day dreams on that foundation.  He would come back, for of course he would be found and acquitted, and buy the Sayre place perhaps, or build a much larger one, and they would all go to Europe in his yacht.  But she knew now that the woman Leslie had sent his flowers to had loomed large in Dick’s past, and she both hated and feared her.  Not content with having given her, Nina, some bad hours, she saw the woman now possibly blocking her ambitions for Elizabeth.

“What I’m getting at is this,” she said, examining her polished nails critically.  “If it does turn out that there was somebody, you’d have to remember that it was all years and years ago, and be sensible.”

“I only want him back,” Elizabeth said.  “I don’t care how he comes, so he comes.”

Louis Bassett had become a familiar figure in the village life by that time.  David depended on him with a sort of wistful confidence that set him to grinding his teeth occasionally in a fury at his own helplessness.  And, as the extent of the disaster developed, as he saw David failing and Lucy ageing, and when in time he met Elizabeth, the feeling of his own guilt was intensified.

He spent hours studying the case, and he was chiefly instrumental in sending Harrison Miller back to Norada in September.  He had struck up a friendship with Miller over their common cause, and the night he was to depart that small inner group which was fighting David’s battle for him formed a board of strategy in Harrison’s tidy living-room; Walter Wheeler and Bassett, Miller and, tardily taken into their confidence, Doctor Reynolds.

The same group met him on his return, sat around with expectant faces while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on the table, and waited while their envoy, laying Bassett’s map on the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the pass, some sketchy mountains, and a small square.

“I’ve got something,” he said at last.  “Not much, but enough to work on.  Here’s where you lost him, Bassett.”  He pointed with his pencil.  “He went on for a while on the horse.  Then somehow he must have lost the horse, for he turned up on foot, date unknown, in a state of exhaustion at a cabin that lies here.  I got lost myself, or I’d never have found the place.  He was sick there for weeks, and he seems to have stayed on quite a while after he recovered, as though he couldn’t decide what to do next.”