“Don’t tell me you’re tangled up with another woman.”

“No.  At least I think not.  I don’t know.”

It is doubtful if Walter Wheeler grasped many of the technicalities that followed.  Dick talked and he listened, nodding now and then, and endeavoring very hard to get the gist of the matter.  It seemed to him curious rather than serious.  Certainly the mind was a strange thing.  He must read up on it.  Now and then he stopped Dick with a question, and Dick would break in on his narrative to reply.  Thus, once: 

“You’ve said nothing to Elizabeth at all?  About the walling off, as you call it?”

“No.  At first I was simply ashamed of it.  I didn’t want her to get the idea that I wasn’t normal.”

“I see.”

“Now, as I tell you, I begin to think—­ I’ve told you that this walling off is an unconscious desire to forget something too painful to remember.  It’s practically always that.  I can’t go to her with just that, can I?  I’ve got to know first what it is.”

“I’d begun to think there was an understanding between you.”

Dick faced him squarely.

“There is.  I didn’t intend it.  In fact, I was trying to keep away from her.  I didn’t mean to speak to her until I’d cleared things up.  But it happened anyhow; I suppose the way those things always happen.”

It was Walter Wheeler’s own decision, finally, that he go to Norada with Dick as soon as David could be safely left.  It was the letter which influenced him.  Up to that he had viewed the situation with a certain detachment; now he saw that it threatened the peace of two households.

“It’s a warning, all right.”

“Yes.  Undoubtedly.”

“You don’t recognize the name Bassett?”

“No.  I’ve tried, of course.”

The result of some indecision was finally that Elizabeth should not be told anything until they were ready to tell it all.  And in the end a certain resentment that she had become involved in an unhappy situation died in Walter Wheeler before Dick’s white face and sunken eyes.

At ten o’clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter Wheeler got up and went out into the hall.

“Go on upstairs, Margaret,” he said to his wife.  “I’ve got a visitor.”  He did not look at Elizabeth.  “You settle down and be comfortable,” he added, “and I’ll be up before long.  Where’s Jim?”

“I don’t know.  He didn’t go to Nina’s.”

“He started with you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.  But he left us at the corner.”

They exchanged glances.  Jim had been worrying them lately.  Strange how a man could go along for years, his only worries those of business, his track a single one through comfortable fields where he reaped only what he sowed.  And then his family grew up, and involved him without warning in new perplexities and new troubles.  Nina first, then Jim, and now this strange story which so inevitably involved Elizabeth.