There is no doubt that when the frantic man realized his befogging ignorance, and found himself involved in this dreadful delay, the hotel clerk's apprehensions were, at least for wild moments, justified. But only for moments--Elizabeth was to be rescued! David could not consider escape from his own misery until that task had been accomplished. Yet consider: his girl, his woman--another man's; and he helpless! And suppose he did rescue her; suppose he did drag her from the arms of the thief who had been his friend--could it ever be the same? Never. Never. Never. His Elizabeth was dead. The woman whom he meant to have yet--somehow, sometime, somewhere; the woman whom Blair Maitland had filched from him, was not his Elizabeth. The rose, trampled in the mire, may be lifted, it may be revived, it may be fragrant--but it has known the mire! There were, in the early darkening afternoon, crazy moments for David Richie. Moments of murderous hate of Blair, moments of unbearable consciousness of his own responsibility, moments of almost repulsion for the tragic, marred creature he loved; and at this last appalling revelation to himself of his own possibilities--moments of absolute despair. And when one of those despairing moments came, he put his head down on the table, on his folded arms, and cried for his mother. He cried hard, like a child: "Materna!" And so it was that he arose and went to his mother. CHAPTER XXII When, after his interview with David, Robert Ferguson went into Mrs. Maitland's office at the Works, he looked older by twenty years than when he had left it the night before. Sarah Maitland, sitting at her desk, heard his step, and wheeled round to greet him. "Better shut that door," she said briefly; and he gave the door in the glass partition a shove with his foot. Then they looked at each other. "Well," she said; and stretched out her hand. "We're in the same box. I guess we'd better shake hands." She grinned with pain, but she forced her grunt of a laugh. "What's your story? Mine is only his explanation to Nannie." "Mine isn't even that. She merely wrote me she had married him; that was all. Miss White told me what he wrote to Nannie. What do you know about it?" "That's all I know," she said, and gave him Blair's note. He read it, and handed it back in silence. "Well, what are you going to do?" she asked. "Do? There's nothing to do. I'm done with her!" "He's my son," Sarah Maitland said. "I have got to do something."