Following the Doctor into his study, Vance shot a hasty look into the room on the left and saw a still fairly young man (who looked like somebody he had seen working on the highway) stretched out on a couch, his hands lavishly bandaged.

“I won’t take but a minute of your time, Doc,” Vance began. He held a big straw hat in his hands which he wore to protect his head from the boiling August sun, but in his haste to get to the doctor’s he had forgotten to put it on, and had carried it as one would a parcel.

The particular news which he had borne, the medicinal hospital smells, the brief glimpse of the man with the bloodstained bandages had made Vance begin to keel over, but the doctor quickly pushed his head down, and then seeing he was not going to pass out, pressed a smelling bottle to his nose.

“It’s Sidney, Doc,” Vance had begun, lifting his head up, and gazing helplessly at the physician. “He’s come home. . . . But don’t start so, Doc . . . It’s all right . . . He’s been pardoned. He’s a free man.”

That was how it began. Sidney was sent home from prison to us, pardoned, but he hadn’t been able to pardon what he felt about himself.

Sidney was a big fellow when he was sent up, and his extreme size made him look older than he was. At fifteen people sometimes took him for draft age.

Now when he came home from prison he looked considerably smaller, and younger. He looked almost as young as his kid brother Vance, who was twenty.

There were times now after he had got back when Sidney would go into his brother’s bedroom and behave as if he was going to ask Vance something, his mouth would open slightly and all the time he tried to speak he looked like he had been slapped. He really looked slapped all the time. Then having said nothing he would stare in the direction of Vance as if he was the author of all his pain.

“It hurts me more than anything else ever did,” Vance was explaining to Dr. Ulric now. “Sidney don’t want to go out to see anybody, and he’s not happy either when he’s with me. . . .”

“Why force him then?” the Doc retorted, smoking one of those dilapidated-­looking black cigarettes he had been puffing on for forty years. “Don’t do anything, Vance, at this time . . . That’s often the best way to deal with a problem. Most problems. Sort of let it go away from you . . . You mind me now, do you hear? . . . But I would like him to come to see me . . . Anytime at all tell him. But don’t you do anything right now. There’s nothing you can do anyhow but let him know he’s still your brother. . . .”