Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her
grief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family depended
on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him that
Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect
responsibility for the son's death; it was to him that Jim's mother,
lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or on her couch, brought her
anxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? And
an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with
him.

In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly,
before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to
find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not
tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had
played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where
men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as
her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world,
passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.

He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick
rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably
for the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman,
vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with
the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to
stare at him.