"There was never another like us." The son's voice was very low. There was a moment's silence. The doctor, his beseeching eyes on the younger man's half-averted face, was groping in his mind for the right words to introduce the subject which all the evening had been at the door of his lips--Helen. He felt that now, with Burke's softened heart to lend lenience, and with his lonely life in prospect to plead the need of companionship, was the time, if ever, that an appeal for Helen might be successful. But the right words of introduction had not come to him when Burke himself began to speak again. "And it's almost as if I'd lost both father and mother," he went on brokenly; "for dad talked so much of mother. To him she was always with us, I think. I can remember, when I was a little boy, how real she was to me. In all we did or said she seemed to have a part. And always, all the way up, he used to talk of her--except for the time when--" He stopped abruptly. The doctor, watching, wondered at the white compression that came suddenly to his lips. In a moment it was gone, however, and he had resumed speaking. "Of late years, dad has seemed to talk more than ever of mother, and he spoke always as if she were with us. And now I'm alone--so utterly alone. Gleason--how ever am I going to live--without--dad!" The doctor's heart leaped with mingled fear and elation: fear at what he was about to do; elation that his chance to do it had come. He cleared his throat and began, courageously, though not quite steadily. "But--there's your wife, Burke. If only you--" He stopped short in dismay at the look that had come into Burke Denby's face. "My wife! My wife! Don't speak of my wife now, man, if you want me to keep my reason! The woman who brought more sorrow to my father than any other living being! What do you think I wouldn't give if I could blot out the memory of the anguish my marriage brought to dad? I can see his eyes now, when he was pleading with me--_before_ it. Afterwards--Do you know what a brick dad was afterwards? Well, I'll tell you. Never by so much as a look--much less a word--has he reproached or censured me. At first he--he just put up a wall between us. But it was a wall of grief and sore hurt. It was never anger. I know that now. Then, one day, somehow, I found that wall down, and I looked straight into dad's eyes. It was never there again--that wall. I knew, of course, that dad had never--forgotten. The hurt and grief were still there,--that I could so disobey him, disregard his wishes,--but he would not let them be a wall between us any longer. Then, when it all turned out as it did-- But he never once said, 'I told you so,' nor even looked it. And he was kind and good to Helen always. But when I think how I--I, who love him so--brought to him all that grief and anguish of heart, I-- My wife, indeed! Gleason, I never want to see her face again, or hear her name spoken!"