"Well, there's no use beating about the bush. I may as well go straight to the point. Ready, Ramsdell? All right. To H. P. Whittenden, Seven, Blank Street, New York City. Sure you've got that right? All right. Then: Getting badly bored and losing grip fast. Come pull me out. Opdyke. That's all, Ramsdell. Send it off, to-night."
Next afternoon, Whittenden came, to all seeming the same unspoiled, curly-headed youngster who had helped to open Brenton's eyes, so long ago, to the real good there was in life, despite the melancholy teachings of his early Calvinism. The professor was busy with a class, Mrs. Opdyke had a cold; and so it came about that Olive, dropping in, that morning, and hearing of the dilemma, offered to drive down to meet the guest.
"You always were a comfort, Olive," Reed assured her gratefully. "You've a general-utility sort of disposition that seems to balk at nothing, and therefore we all impose upon you. Sure you don't mind? You can't miss Whittenden. I've told you too many things about him, and he looks exactly the sort of man he is."
Olive did not miss him. More than that, she used the fifteen minutes of their drive together to impress upon the guest's mind the salient facts of Reed's history during the past eleven months, facts largely of the spirit, not a mere physical chronology.
"And the worst of it all is," she said, as she drew up at the Opdyke gate; "we none of us, however much we care for him, however hard we try, can get inside the situation and share it with him. He is bound to go through it, all alone. That is the most maddening phase of the whole thing."
But Whittenden, looking into her brown eyes, had his doubts of that. Before he went to bed, that night, his doubts were even greater.
As a matter of fact, neither Reed Opdyke nor his guest slept very much, that night. Indeed, they scarcely went to bed at all. Ramsdell, dozing in the next room, fully dressed, to be in call when Opdyke needed to be put into bed, had a hazy idea that the evening was eighteen hours long and that both the men talked throughout it, without pause. The truth of the matter was, however, that the pauses were both long and frequent, those quiet times which come across a conversation full of mutual understanding. At the start, there had been a good deal to say on both sides. It was the first time the two men had met since Opdyke's accident; an experience such as that can never fully be explained by letters, especially when, on one side, the letters have to be dictated to a man like Ramsdell, sounder of heart than of orthography. Reed slurred over most of the details of the accident, even now. What he did not slur over, what he had summoned his friend to hear, was the record of the months that had come after, a record which, for just the once, he allowed himself to paint in its true colours, dull, dun gray, and deep, deep black.
"That's all, Whittenden," he said abruptly at last. "I suppose I might have gone about it a little bit more tersely; but, the fact is, I haven't been letting myself rehearse it often. It's bad for the audience."
"And almighty good for you," the curly-headed rector said tranquilly. "Mind if I smoke, Reed?"
"Of course not. Sorry I can't join you. It's forbidden fruit, like most other things, these days." He lay very still, for a while. Then he looked up, with the ghost of his accustomed smile. "Well, what do you make out of it all, Whittenden? You've heard and seen the worst of me. Now what next? Is this losing my grip the final stage of the whole bad matter?"