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.

It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not that
he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had
been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much
trouble even to think.

Tr