rom 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.

"Until she can have the whole thing," he said, with the new heaviness
which had crept into his voice.

Beside that real trouble Dick's looked dim and nebulous. Other things
could be set right; there was