ey called at the house and found it empty,
deserted. He traced them to a new neighborhood where they had rented a
house with a peaceful, walled garden. They were not pleased to see him,
but Clancey was a psychologist of sorts himself and a working agreement
was arrived at whereby he and Warwick could drop in frequently as
friends and quietly observe Timmy, chatting with him when they could
win his confidence and submitting him to whatever tests they could
adequately disguise. But under pain of permanent excommunication from
the Douglas menage they were not to discuss him with outsiders in such
a way as to either identify him or draw attention to him. Timmy was to
be allowed to set his own pace under their obliquely-watching eyes.
He was not to become a subject for newspaper comment, for the speculation
of strangers, or for the heated discussion of learned gentlemen calling
each other liars in six syllables. For Timmy was something new under
the sun.

Two years of observation gave Clancey and Warwick an impressive file of
notes on him, and they were prone to sit after office hours with it on
the desk between them, giving it morose glances. They were not happy.
Sometimes, as now, they concluded an evening visit by sitting in
Clancey's or Warwick's car parked outside the Douglas fence, holding an
impromptu post-mortem on an intellectual corpse that had come to life
in complete defiance of all the rules. They didn't notice the stealthy
movement of one of the fence-boards, nor the small form that snaked
through the shadows of concealing shrubbery until it was near the open
window of the car.

"Take word-association, Clancey. I had a few minutes with him this
evening before you got here, so I started him on a 'game' where we took
turns in saying a word and trying to guess what the other would reply.
I believe he thought I was rather a simpleton and needed humoring.
Anyway, I tried him with 'home' and got a delayed response. It's
happened before. Apparently the concept of home is tied to some deeper
disturbance." There was a slight, uneasy movement from the listening
figure. "Well, linking home and family, on my next turn I shot 'mother'
at him. There was an immediate flash of confusion in his eyes and again
a delayed response before he blurted 'Mom.' Something else had been on
the tip of his tongue, but he choked it back and selected what seemed
to him a more suitable reply.

"Now, we both know from two years' systematic o