He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no
untoward symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier
and more natural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth
first, and then on and on from that starting point, through the
years ahead. He saw the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for
his return; he saw both their lives united and flowing on together,
with children, with small cares, with the routine of daily living,
and behind it all the two of them, hand in hand.

Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years
it had done that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional
detachment, and studied his own case. With the entrance into his
world of the new science of psycho-analysis he had made now and
then small, not very sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his
own unconscious devising. Not very sincere, for with the increase
of his own knowledge of the mind he had learned that behind such
conditions as his lay generally, deeply hidden, the desire to
forget. And that behind that there lay, acknowledged or not, fear.

"But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first
text-books on the new science appeared, and he and David were
learning the new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with
contemptuous snorts of derision. "To forget what?"

"You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly. "I think
this man's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for
one thing. And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity
yourself. You'd fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years,
you came out of it with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that
cabin about fifty-six hours. Forget! You had plenty to forget."