He was riding down that street at night on a small horse, and his father was beside him on a tall one.  He looked up at his father, and he seemed very large.  The largest man in the world.  And the most important.

It began and stopped there, and his endeavor to follow it further resulted in its ultimately leaving him.  It faded, became less real, until he wondered if he had not himself conjured it.  But that experience taught him something.  Things out of the past would come or they would not come, but they could not be forced.  One could not will to revive them.

He stood at a window facing north that night, under the impression it was east, and sent his love and an inarticulate sort of prayer to Elizabeth, for her safety and happiness, in the general direction of the Arctic Circle.

Bassett had not returned in the morning, and he found himself with a day on his hands.  He decided to try the experiment of visiting the Livingstone ranch, or at least of viewing it from a safe distance, with the hope of a repetition of last night’s experience.  Of all his childish memories the ranch house, next to his father, was most distinct.  When he had at various times tried to analyze what things he recalled he had found that what they lacked of normal memory was connection.  They stood out, like the one the night before, each complete in itself, brief, and having no apparent relation to what had gone before or what came after.

But the ranch house had been different.  The pictures were mostly superimposed on it; it was their background.  Himself standing on the mountain looking down at it, and his father pointing to it; the tutor who was afraid of horses, sitting at a big table in a great wood-ceiled and wood-paneled room; a long gallery or porch along one side of the building and rooms added on to the house so that one had to go along the gallery to reach them; a gun-room full of guns.

When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found his recollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one thing stood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost incredible fact that for one entire day and for the evening of another, he had openly appeared in Norada and had not been recognized.  That fact was his discovery that the Livingstone ranch house had no place in his memory whatever.

He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this was the old Livingstone ranch house.  And it bore no resemblance, not the faintest, to the building he remembered.  It did not lie where it should have lain.  The mountains were too far behind it.  It was not the house.  The fields were not the proper fields.  It was wrong, all wrong.

He went no closer than the highway, because it was not necessary.  He ordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only time he was filled with bitter resentment against David.  David had fooled him.  He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his eyes hot, and let his indignation burn in him like a flame.