Then, one day, he met Mrs. Sayre, and saw that she knew him.

XXXVII

Wallie stared at his mother.  His mind was at once protesting the fact and accepting it, with its consequences to himself.  There was a perceptible pause before he spoke.  He stood, if anything, somewhat straighter, but that was all.

“Are you sure it was Livingstone?”

“Positive.  I talked to him.  I wasn’t sure myself, at first.  He looked shabby and thin, as though he’d been ill, and he had the audacity to pretend at first he didn’t know me.  He closed the door on me and—­”

“Wait a minute, mother.  What door?”

“He was driving a taxicab.”

He looked at her incredulously.

“I don’t believe it,” he said slowly.  “I think you’ve made a mistake, that’s all.”

“Nonsense.  I know him as well as I know you.”

“Did he acknowledge his identity?”

“Not in so many words,” she admitted.  “He said I had made a mistake, and he stuck to it.  Then he shut the door and drove me to the station.  The only other chance I had was at the station, and there was a line of cabs behind us, so I had only a second.  I saw he didn’t intend to admit anything, so I said:  ’I can see you don’t mean to recognize me, Doctor Livingstone, but I must know whether I am to say at home that I’ve seen you.’  He was making change for me at the time—­I’d have known his hands, I think, if I hadn’t seen anything else-and when he looked up his face was shocking.  He said, ‘Are they all right?’ ‘David is very ill,’ I said.  The cars behind were waiting and making a terrific din, and a traffic man ran up then and made him move on.  He gave me the strangest look as he went.  I stood and waited, thinking he would turn and come back again at the end of the line, but he didn’t.  I almost missed my train.”

Wallie’s first reaction to the news was one of burning anger and condemnation.

“The blackguard!” he said.  “The insufferable cad!  To have run away as he did, and then to let them believe him dead!  For that’s what they do believe.  It is killing David Livingstone, and as for Elizabeth—­ She’ll have to be told, mother.  He’s alive.  He’s well.  And he has deliberately deserted them all.  He ought to be shot.”

“You didn’t see him, Wallie.  I did.  He’s been through something, I don’t know what.  I didn’t sleep last night for thinking of his face.  It had despair in it.”

“All right,” he said, angrily pausing before her.  “What do you intend to do?  Let them go on as they are, hoping and waiting; lauding him to the skies as a sort of superman?  The thing to do is to tell the truth.”

“But we don’t know the truth, Wallie.  There’s something behind it all.”

“Nothing very creditable, be sure of that,” he pronounced.  “Do you think it is fair to Elizabeth to let her waste her life on the memory of a man who’s deserted her?”