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"If it's the silly talk that I daresay you've heard--"
"No. I don't give a damn for talk. But there is something else.
Something I haven't told Elizabeth, and that I'll have to tell you."
Walter Wheeler drew himself up rather stiffly. Leslie's defection was
still in his mind.
"Don't tell me you're tangled up with another woman."
"No. At least I think not. I don't know."
It is doubtful if Walter Wheeler grasped many of the technicalities
that followed. Dick talked and he listened, nodding now and then, and
endeavoring very hard to get the gist of the matter. It seemed to him
curious rather than serious. Certainly the mind was a strange thing. He
must read up on it. Now and then he stopped Dick with a question, and
Dick would break in on his narrative to reply. Thus, once: "You've said nothing to Elizabeth at all? About the walling off, as you
call it?"
"No. At first I was simply ashamed of it. I didn't want her to get the
idea that I wasn't normal."
"I see."
"Now, as I tell you, I begin to think--I've told you that this walling
off is an unconscious desire to forget something too painful to
remember. It's practically always that. I can't go to her with just
that, can I? I've got to know first what it is."
"I'd begun to think there was an understanding between you."
Dick faced him squarely.
"There is. I didn't intend it. In fact, I was trying to keep away from
her. I didn't mean to speak to her until I'd cleared things up. But it
happened anyhow; I suppose the way those things always happen."
It was Walter Wheeler's own decision, finally, that he go to Norada
with Dick as soon as David could be safely left. It was the letter which
influenced him. Up to that he had viewed the situation with a certain
detachment; now he saw that it threatened the peace of two households.
"It's a warning, all right."
"Yes. Undoubtedly."
"You don't recognize the name Bassett?"
"No. I've tried, of course."
The result of some indecision was finally that Elizabeth should not be
told anything until they were ready to tell it all. And in the end a
certain resentment that she had become involved in an unhappy situation
died in Walter Wheeler before Dick's white face and sunken eyes.
At ten o'clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter Wheeler got
up and went out into the hall.