“I guess nobody could look up to me now, Vance, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not so, Sid. I didn’t mean that, and you mustn’t say it!”

Sid reared up in bed and pushed his back against the bedstead with almost the same kind of wild and frenzied movement as he had the night of the shooting when he had pressed his back against the wall as he stood facing the dying Brian McFee.

“I think more highly of you I believe than ever before,” Vance continued doggedly. “I know I am the last person on earth you would want to confide these things to, Sid. That’s my fault too. . . . But Sid,” and here Vance’s own voice took on some of the wildness of his brother’s, “promise me one thing, forget this Roy Sturtevant. Nobody can cause another man evil unless the second party involved allows him to . . .”

Sidney stared at his brother like thunderstruck. Then he took him in his arms and kissed him fiercely.

“You don’t look on me as stained and dirty then?” Sidney cried in a kind of hopeful buoyance.

“You know better, Sid.”

Vance had not told Sidney he would confide in the doctor, but he had to tell somebody. He had to unburden himself and after all telling the Doc was like whispering it to the river by midnight. Yet he felt somehow he had done wrong. He should have kept Sidney’s secret locked in his own heart. He felt suddenly in the first wake of his disappointment and anger that Brian McFee deserved killing.

“So now you know,” Vance said with some ill temper in his voice. “Or did you, judging by your expression, did you always know . . . I suppose you did.”

“I don’t think of people as queer or straight,” the Doc said. “Not when you’re as old as I. And I don’t think God does either.”

“I didn’t know you believed in God, Doc,” Vance said in a choked voice, for his grief was getting the better of him again.

“Well, I believe in the soul I guess, the soul somehow that is one and is in everybody. I am not a thinker, Vance.”

He kept fingering a piece of paper. Actually it was a letter he had been poring over and debating whether or not to show to Vance.

“You have been worrying about Sidney not having a job,” the Doctor began, and Vance did not know whether to shout for joy or to curse the old man for his seeming indifference to his having told of the fall of his idol.

“Isn’t that a fact, Vance . . . You wanted for Sidney to have a job.”

“It is,” Vance replied.

“Look here, my boy,” the old man’s voice rose. “You have got to brace up now. The worst is over. He’s back.”