the windows of home. Save
for the gap between the drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening to
David's face bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear. Still
by an effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions of
his life with only a scar between them.

Not that he formulated it. It was rather a mood, an impulse of
unreasoning happiness. The last cloud had gone, the last bit of mist
from the valley. He saw Haverly, and the children who played in its
shaded streets; Mike washing the old car, and the ice cream freezer on
Sundays, wrapped in sacking on the kitchen porch. Jim Wheeler came back
to him, the weight of his coffin dragging at his right hand as he helped
to carry it; he was kneeling beside Elizabeth's bed, and putting his
hand over her staring eyes so she would go to sleep.

The glow died away, and he began to suffer intensely. They were all lost
to him, along with the life they represented. And already he began to
look back on his period of forgetfulness with regret. At least then he
had not known what he had lost.

He wondered again what they knew. What did they think? If they believed
him dead, was that not kinder than the truth? Outside of David and Lucy,
and of course Bassett, the sole foundation on which any search for him
had rested had been the semi-hysterical recognition of Hattie Thorwald.
But he wondered how far that search had gone.

Had it extended far enough to involve David? Had the hue and cry died
away, or were the police still searching for him? Could he even write
to David, without involving him in his own trouble? For David, fine,
wonderful old David--David had deliberately obstructed the course of
justice, and was an accessory after the fact.

Up to that time he had drifted, unable to set a course in the fog, but
now he could see the way, and it led him back to Norada. He would not
communicate with David. He would go out of the lives at the old house as
he had gone in, under a lie. When he surrendered it would be as Judson
Clark, with his lips shut tight on the years since his escape. Let them
think, if they would, that the curtain that had closed down over his
memory had not lifted, and that he had picked up life again where he
had laid it down. The police would get nothing from him to incriminate
David.

But he had a moment, too, when surrender seemed to him not strength but
weakness; where its sheer supineness, its easy solution to his problem
revolted hi