During all the long night Dick sat by David’s bedside.  Earlier in the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good.  For this time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time.  He was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefully regulated, and with care he still had long years before him.

David slept, his breathing heavy and slow.  In the morning there would be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himself kept watch.  On the walnut bed lay Doctor David’s portly figure, dimly outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.

He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untoward symptoms appeared, as David’s sleep seemed to grow easier and more natural, Dick’s thoughts wandered.  They went to Elizabeth first, and then on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead.  He saw the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw both their lives united and flowing on together, with children, with small cares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two of them, hand in hand.

Then his mind turned on himself.  How often in the past ten years it had done that!  He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment, and studied his own case.  With the entrance into his world of the new science of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not very sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising.  Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mind he had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally, deeply hidden, the desire to forget.  And that behind that there lay, acknowledged or not, fear.

“But to forget what?” he used to say to David, when the first text-books on the new science appeared, and he and David were learning the new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts of derision.  “To forget what?”

“You had plenty to forget,” David would say, stolidly.  “I think this man’s a fool, but at that—­you’d had your father’s death, for one thing.  And you’d gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself.  You’d fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of it with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-six hours.  Forget!  You had plenty to forget.”

It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David’s story.  It did not, even now.  He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father; he was David’s brother.  And he had died.  It was the shock of that death, according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David had followed and nursed him back to health.