"And always the lie that saved me is threatening to destroy me," Rogers went on, in a lower voice. "God, how I've worked to get to this poor place! How I want to live peacefully, honestly! But some day someone will find out I'm an ex-convict. A breath, and this poor house of cards I've worked so hard to build and protect will go flat! And I cannot begin all over again. I cannot! I haven't the strength. This is going to happen—I feel it! And how I fear it! How I've feared it for ten long years! Man, man, how I fear it!"
He dropped exhausted into a chair, and almost at once a cough began to shake him by the shoulders.
"And this disease"—a hand pressed itself upon his chest—"it's another prison gift!" he gasped, bitterly.
There was not a word in David. He reached out and gathered one of Rogers's thin hands in both of his; gathered it in the clasp of his soul. The cough ceased its shaking and Rogers looked up. He gazed at the tears, at the quivering brothership, in David's face. Thus he sat, silent, gripping David's hands; then, slowly, his own tears started.
"Man, dear," he whispered brokenly, "I think I'm going to be glad you found me out!"
CHAPTER VII
HOPE AND DEJECTION
A week or two later Rogers cut out all qualifying words and said from his heart, "I'm glad you know!" He and David quickly became comrades; and many an hour they sat in the room behind the office talking of life, of philosophy, of books. David now learned that Rogers had done a large part of his really wide reading while in prison; and he now understood Rogers's frequent mispronunciation—Rogers had acquired his less common words entirely from reading, and never having heard them spoken, and lacking such fundamentals of education as rules of pronunciation, he had for fifteen years been pronouncing his new words as seemed to him proper.
David was surprised to find that Rogers, for all his occasional bitter flashes, was an optimist. He often marvelled how Rogers had retained this hopefulness for the world's future; he could explain it only by a great natural soundness in the man. Rogers believed the world was marching forward, and he often said, his eyes illumined with belief: "The time is coming, Aldrich—I shall not see it, and you may not, but it's coming—when there will be no human waste, when the world will have learned the economy of men!"