m, though, now that he was dead,
Davidge felt suddenly that he must have been indeed the first and the
eternal victim of his own qualities.

Jake had been a complainer, a cynic, a loafer always from his cradle
on--indeed, his mother used to say that he nearly kicked her to death
before he was born.

Mamise had hated and loathed him, but she felt now that Abbie had been
righter than she in loving the wretch who had been dowered with no
beauty of soul or body.

She waited for Davidge to say something. After a long silence, she
asked:

"Are you there?"

"Yes."

"You don't say anything about poor Jake."

"I--I don't know what to say."

He felt it hateful to withhold praise from the dead, and yet a kind of
honesty forced him to oppose the habit of lauding all who have just
died, since it cheapened the praise of the dead who deserve praise--or
what we call "deserve."

Mamise spoke in a curiously unnatural tone: "It was noble of poor Jake
to give his life trying to save the ship, wasn't it?"

"What's that?" said Davidge, and she spoke with labored precision.

"I say that you and I, who were the only witnesses, feel sorry that
poor Jake had to be killed in the struggle with Easton."

"Oh, I see! Yes--yes," said Davidge, understanding.

Mamise went on: "Mr. Larrey was here and he didn't know who Jake was
till I told him how he helped you try to disarm Nicky. It will be a
fine thing for poor Abbie and her children to remember that, won't
it?"

Davidge's heart ached with a sudden appreciation of the sweet purpose
of Mamise's falsehood.

"Yes, yes," he said. "I'll give Abbie a pension on his account."

"That's beautiful of you!"

And so it was done. It pleased a sardonic fate to let Jake Nuddle pose
in his tomb as the benefactor he had always pretended to be.

The operative, Larrey, had made many adverse reports against him, but
in the blizzard of reports against hundreds of thousands of suspects
that turned the Department of Justice files into a huge snowdrift
these earlier accounts of Nuddle's treasonable utterances and deeds
were forgotten.

The self-destruction of Nicky Easton took its brief space in the
newspapers overcrowded with horrors, and he, too, was all but
forgotten.

When, after some further time, Mamise was able to call upon Davidge in
her wheeled chair, she found him strangely lacking in cordiality. She
was bitterly hurt at first, until she gleaned from his manner that he
was trying to r