n the
corner, straightened and looked around. Dick was suddenly asleep and
breathing heavily.

For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him
and trying to plan some course of action. He was overcome by his own
responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened. That
Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself
when he wakened, he could no longer doubt. His mind wandered back to
that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that
along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not
exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread
in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle
the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone,
the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed,
Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all
threads.

He swore in a whisper.

The maid tapped at the door. He opened it an inch or so and sent her
off. In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger.
She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and
she might have known Clark. Just what Providence had kept him from
recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on
indefinitely.

After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went down to
lunch. He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the room, to think
without that quiet figure before him. Over the pretence of food he faced
the situation. Lying ready to his hand was the biggest story of his
career, but he could not carry it through. It was characteristic of
him that, before abandoning it, he should follow through to the end the
result of its publication. He did not believe, for instance, that
either Dick's voluntary surrender or his own disclosure of the situation
necessarily meant a conviction for murder. To convict a man of a crime
he did not know he had committed would be difficult. But, with his
customary thoroughness he followed that through also. Livingstone
acquitted was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark.
The new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone. The
story would follow him, never to be lived down. And in his particular
profession confidence and respect were half the game. All that would be
gone.

Thus by gradual stages he got back to David, and he struggled for the
m