Neil McCloud. Age twenty-six. Irish-American. Catholic. No known insanity in family.

It read as if it had been written in answer to questions put to him by Doctor Pryne. Ordinarily the patient would have answered vocally, and Janet, or Doctor Pryne, taken it all down; but in this case, since McCloud could not speak, the answers were written by the patient himself. It seemed that the small, scrupulous script of the upside-down sentence was his ordinary writing when he was not furious....

Petra turned the card over and read on: “Oldest of five. Father a garage proprietor in Springfield, Mass. I graduated from High School tenth in class of ninety. My mother wanted me to go to college but I wouldn’t. Went to work for my father as a stop-gap. Wanted to get with airplanes. Father paid me a skilled mechanic’s wages because I was by that time a skilled mechanic,—grew up with the engines, so to speak. Machinery interested me more than books. Except aeronautics books. Read all of those the library had and bought all I could find. I got in with the fellow who runs the Ocean Road Airport. Spent all my spare time there. Took flying lessons by moonlight. Bought a second-hand plane on savings and credit and began taking people up for hire. Father against it. Wouldn’t let me live at home unless I worked for him.... One day my kid brother turned up at the field. He was the baby. Eleven years old. I knew the folks had forbidden him to go up with me. All the kids were forbidden. But he had hooked a ride out, skipped school, and said he would tell father when he got home, and take his licking. He hated lickings as much as anybody, but it would be worth it to fly. I agreed with him it would. He was captain of his grade football team, a great little kid. After my mother, I guess he meant more to me than anybody living. Anyway, I took him up. We had a grand ride, all afternoon, over four States. Then, making the landing in the field, the propeller broke and we hit the ground wrong. The kid was killed. Broken neck. He died in my arms without the sacraments. I never saw my mother again. They wouldn’t let me into the house. Dad wouldn’t. I don’t think mother ever knew I came. She died that fall. She had been poorly ever since Stephen was born, the kid—that was killed.

“Came to Boston. Got job. Chauffeur for Malcolm Dayton, banker. Eloped with his daughter. We were married by a justice of the peace but Edyth suspected I mightn’t feel really married unless a priest blessed us. She looked up the priest of our parish and I went to him. No, hadn’t gone to the Funeral Mass for the kid even, and never to confession since the smash. The priest made me ashamed but agreed to get the dispensations. He talked to Edyth and assured himself she was old enough to know her own mind and really wanted to be my wife. She is ten years older than me. So I confessed and was taken back and received communion, and we were married again in the rectory before the housekeeper and janitor. Edyth was to take instruction. I could have lived alone outside the Church all right, but couldn’t have rested easy with my wife outside it. So I was glad Edyth insisted, I guess. Remembered my mother too well! Couldn’t imagine the mother of my children not a Catholic!

“Dayton went crazy when we told him. He wrote that he would buy a divorce for Edyth any time she asked him to, but until then to keep away from him. We had a baby the first year. A boy. I got a job selling the new Ajax cars. I thought we were pretty well off, but Edyth didn’t. We had a nice apartment and a maid. My mother never had a maid. Edyth’s friends stuck to her. They were fine. Some of them I liked a lot. But she was never really mine. Somehow she was her father’s girl. The baby was born at the Lying-In. The day they were coming home, I had to give a driving lesson in Arlington, but a girl friend of Edyth’s was bringing them and would help the nurse and the maid fix them up comfortably. But I came home and found nobody but the nurse. Called the hospital and they told me that Dayton had come for his daughter and grandson. Called the house. Got Dayton himself. Sorry—can’t remember a word he said. But I knew that Edyth and the baby were with him and weren’t coming home. And the next day he sent a lawyer around who told me that the old man had had me watched and that they had a clear case for a divorce. They had one framed, all right—but no use going into that. I had not been unfaithful. No, I told you, I can’t remember a single word he said on the ’phone.

“No—I didn’t say a word to the nurse who had stood staring at me while I ’phoned. Found I couldn’t. But I thought it was because I was crying. The baby and his mother not coming home, you know. Thought it was tears in my throat. I thought so then, I mean. I walked out of the apartment, got into the car, drove all night. At dawn I was back in Boston. I don’t remember where I drove or anything about it.

“Yes, I stopped for gasoline once or twice during the night. I held up my fingers to show how many gallons and didn’t say a word. But I didn’t realize it was because I couldn’t speak until I got back to the apartment in the morning. The nurse had slept there and was waiting for her money. Yes, my throat closes up whenever I try to speak. It’s like tears—or a sob. Don’t like to try any more. No, haven’t been to Mass since the Sunday before Edyth and the boy were coming home from the hospital. No—don’t want to see a priest. I’ve lost my faith, I think. No, my family know nothing about me. They won’t, either.

“The Ajax people kept me on as a mechanic. It’s charity, really. They’re as hard hit as all the rest by the depression. They really can’t afford a mechanic who can’t talk to the people who drive in. The boss sent me to you. I make thirty a week. Can pay you ten. Ten a week goes to the smashed plane debt. If you don’t cure me quickly, I’ll disappear. The boss is risking his own job, keeping me on. Yes, the boy is fine. When I saw him at the hospital he looked like my kid brother. The kid would have been his uncle.”

There the history proper ended and Janet’s typing began. It was a report of the physical condition of the patient. Doctor Pryne had, apparently, passed McCloud on to various specialists. Petra skipped all this. It was technical and dull but as much as she took in appeared to rate McCloud’s physical condition as excellent. All the remaining cards in the pile, a dozen or more, written on both sides, in Doctor Pryne’s illegible hand, might as well have been inscribed in Chinese for all Petra could read of them. They appeared to record the experiments in treatment Doctor Pryne had tried on the case, and would have been fascinating, Petra thought, if only she could have read three consecutive words.

But one sentence was clear,—and underlined: “Must find out what Malcolm Dayton said to him on the telephone.”

As she read this, Petra heard some one breathe.... She had not noticed the step in the reception office nor in this room, but she heard the breath, soft as it was. She looked up from the card she was studying and saw Janet. It was the secretary’s sharply indrawn breath that had so startled Petra. But when she woke to the expression on her new friend’s face, her very blood ran cold. This was not Janet, the intelligent, the kind, the clever Janet. What had happened to her? What was the matter?