He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably for the mistress of the place to see him.  She came at last, a big woman, vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to stare at him.

“My God!” she said.  “I thought you were dead!”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaking me for some one else, aren’t you?”

She looked at him carefully.

“I’d have sworn—­” she muttered, and turning to the button inside the door she switched on the light.  Then she surveyed him again.

“What’s your name?”

“Livingstone.  Doctor Livingstone.  I called—­”

“Is that for me, or for the police?”

“Now see here,” he said pleasantly.  “I don’t know who you are mistaking me for, and I’m not hiding from the police.  Here’s my card, and I have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed recently in an automobile accident.”

She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of him.

“Well, you fooled me all right,” she said at last.  “I thought you were—­well, never mind that.  What about this Wheeler family?  Are they going to settle with the undertaker?  Because I tell you flat, I can’t and won’t.  She owed me a month’s rent, and her clothes won’t bring over seventy-five or a hundred dollars.”

As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after him.  He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindly story to tell the family.  He could not let them know that Jim had been seeking love in the byways of life.  And that night he mailed a check in payment of the undertaker’s bill, carefully leaving the stub empty.

On the third day after Jim’s funeral he started for Norada.  An interne from a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, had agreed to take over his work for a time.  But Dick was faintly jealous when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over to a mystified Minnie to look after.

“Is he going to sleep in your bed?” she demanded belligerently.

She was only partially mollified when she found Doctor Reynolds was to have the spare room.  She did not like the way things were going, she confided to Mike.  Why wasn’t she to let on to Mrs. Crosby that Doctor Dick had gone away?  Or to the old doctor?  Both of them away, and that little upstart in the office ready to steal their patients and hang out his own sign the moment they got back!

Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along an extremely crooked path.  He wrote a half dozen pleasant, non-committal letters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time on them, and gave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals.  But his chief difficulty was with Elizabeth.  Perhaps he would have told her; there were times when he had to fight his desire to have her share his anxiety as well as know the truth about him.  But she was already carrying the burden of Jim’s tragedy, and her father, too, was insistent that she be kept in ignorance.