"Good old King. He's some fighter. You ought to be proud of him, Mrs. Porter." "I am. Tell me all you know of him, please. How is he now?" "On the upward way. He's going to come out all right, but"--the speaker cast an almost apologetic look at Linda--"you doubtless know that King was up against it for a while. It seems that one night there at the club when the strain was over, he felt himself going to pieces and he wrote me a note asking me, in case of his illness, to keep his papers--the contents of his desk--from Henry Radcliffe until he should recover." The blood pressed into Linda's face. She was too charitable to her friend even to glance her way. "The note was not finished. King had evidently taken the precaution to address and stamp the envelope before he began, and the last sane thing he did was to seal the letter inside it. By the time I received it and got over to the club, King was gone." "Gone!" Mrs. Porter gasped. "You said--" Fred nodded reassuringly toward her questioning face as she leaned forward. "Yes, they had taken him to the hospital, you know." "Oh!" cried Mrs. Porter, "and I here. Why didn't somebody write me?" Linda sat erect, in an attitude of courteous attention. "I never thought of it, Mrs. Porter. To tell the truth, I didn't know till he was convalescing that you were at all near to one another, and I didn't want to write anything to add to Linda's worries." He glanced at the girl's unmoved face. "Did you keep his papers from Henry?" she asked dryly. "I'll tell you about that." "But you stayed with him--" There was a little break in Mrs. Porter's low, even voice. "You helped him." "You bet I stayed with him, just as much of the time as my boss and the nurse would stand for. I was there every night." "Oh, Mr. Whitcomb," exclaimed Mrs. Porter gratefully, "you don't know what that means to me. Bertram wasn't entirely deserted." "No. Harriet was up in Wisconsin or she would have wanted to help, too. Henry kept King's illness from her; because even if she had been at home she couldn't really have done anything, you know." CHAPTER XXI REVELATION Linda, looking at Mrs. Porter, saw in the light of their many talks that her friend was striving for the composure with which it was her wont to meet adverse circumstances. Fred Whitcomb, too, recognizing that the older woman was the more interested of his listeners, began to address his narration chiefly to her. "King was pretty badly off," he went on. "He was nutty for days, and some of the things he said in his delirium made me feel that--well, that perhaps he'd had a rather lonely time of it. At any rate, he had asked only that his papers should be kept from Radcliffe, so I made up my mind that I'd go through them myself." Fred paused and gave a rather doubtful and wistful look at Linda's immovable countenance. Mrs. Porter's eyes were shining in their attention.