The narrative finished, Osmun soared to heights of eloquence. He pointed out how damning to himself and to his future would be the reappearance of Clive in the Aura community. It would wreck Osmun in pocket and in repute. It might even send him to prison.
Clive’s face as he listened was set in a stern white mask.
Osmun appealed to their boyish days, to the memory of their honored father, and he conjured up pictures of the disgrace that must fall on their father’s name should this secret become a local scandal.
Clive did not speak, nor did his grim face change.
Osmun painted glowing portraits of the wealth that was to be his as soon as his new Wall Street ventures should cash in. The bulk of this wealth he pledged to Clive if the latter would go to some foreign land or to the Coast and there await its arrival.
Clive’s mask face at this point twitched into a momentary smile. The smile was neither pretty nor encouraging.
Osmun, stung by his lamentable failure to recover any atom of his former ascendancy over his brother, fell to threatening.
Again Clive’s tortured mouth relaxed into that unpromising smile. But again the memory of Doris Lane and of the impersonation whereby Osmun had sought to win her in his helpless brother’s guise banished the smile into hard relentlessness. Clive was seeing this worthless twin of his for the first time as the rest of the world had always seen him.
Pushed over the verge of desperation, Osmun Creede saw he had but one fearsome recourse. If he would save his own liberty and perhaps his life as well—to say nothing of fortune and position—this new-returned brother must be made to vanish. Not only that, but to disappear forever, leaving no trace.
Osmun must be allowed to continue playing his double rôle as before and to follow it to the conclusion he had planned. Anything else spelt certain destruction.