It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, even

now. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the

shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually

co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father;

he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death,

according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David

had followed and nursed him back to health.

It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not that

he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had

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been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much

trouble even to think.

True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a

few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the

restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of

money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the

facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house,

and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But

David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future

depended entirely on his own efforts.

Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had

mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which

he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go

back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if

he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that

environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been

totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on,

as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at

odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been

no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the

practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should

have been.

But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a

peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more

of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship,

but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had

been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?




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