Kindest of Friends:
To-morrow, or soon, I will come to you; not to-night. I have to be alone. I am all in confusion. I can see only step by step, and must follow as I may. Two or three things stand out clear. We haven't, we men, played the game fair, though God knows we meant to. They—she and such women as my girl—are right! Blindly, fumblingly right. They are seeking to square themselves, and we have no business to curse them for their efforts.
Lastly, I love Priscilla Glynn, and mean to have her, even at the expense of my profession! You have set my feet on a broad path and promised an honourable position. I have always felt that to try and follow in your steps was the noblest ambition I had. I know now that I could not accomplish this. You have truth and conviction to guide and uphold you. I have doubt. I must work among my fellows with no hint of distrust as to my own position. Forgive me! Go, if you will, to my mother—to Helen. She will need you—after she knows. You will, perhaps, understand when I tell you that, for a time at least, I must be by myself, and I am going to the little town where my own mother and I, long ago, lived our strange life together. She seems to be there, waiting for me.
Ledyard ate no dinner that night; he seemed broken and ill; he pushed dish after dish aside, and finally left the table and the house.
Everything had failed him. All his life's work and hopes rustled past him like dead things as he walked the empty streets.
"Truth and conviction," he muttered. "Who has them? The young ass! What is truth? How can one be convinced? It's all bluff and a doing of one's best!"
And then he reached Helen Travers's house and found her waiting for him.
"I have a—a note from Dick," she said. Ledyard saw that she had been crying.
"Poor boy! He has gone to—his mother; his real mother. We"—she caught her breath—"we have, somehow, failed him. He is in trouble."
"I wonder—why?" Ledyard murmured. Never had his voice held that tone before. It startled even the sad woman.