In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly, before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world, passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey. He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably for the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman, vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to stare at him. “My God!” she said. “I thought you were dead!” “I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?” She looked at him carefully. “I'd have sworn--” she muttered, and turning to the button inside the door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again. “What's your name?” “Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called--” “Is that for me, or for the police?” “Now see here,” he said pleasantly. “I don't know who you are mistaking me for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and I have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed recently in an automobile accident.” She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of him. “Well, you fooled me all right,” she said at last. “I thought you were--well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over seventy-five or a hundred dollars.” As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after him. He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindly story to tell the family. He could not let them know that Jim had been seeking love in the byways of life. And that night he mailed a check in payment of the undertaker's bill, carefully leaving the stub empty. On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada. An interne from a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, had agreed to take over his work for a time. But Dick was faintly jealous when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over to a mystified Minnie to look after. “Is he going to sleep in your bed?” she demanded belligerently.