alone. Only one absent from memory: where was Howard? No word, not a word.
Unexpectedly his father, day and night in a bus, had come to New York. The old man was shocked. His face was gray. He was old.
That day, it happened, all danger was definitely past. Infection had ceased; the wounded flesh, freshly knitted, was healing. His leg lay straight on the bed.
"Dad," he had said. "I'd like to go home."
And thus he was at home. Reading. Resting. Tomorrow in the easy chair. Spring passing, he would grow strong again. Renewal, regeneration had been borne to him through an ordeal of pain. He would never, he decided, return to New York.
On the impressionistic canvas of his memory, a detail, lividly plain, emerged. The masquerade, he now called it. For in the still hours, dad at his office, Martha cooking dinner, the Dallas paper read, it was quite apparent that he had never sinned wilfully. Faintly amused at the idea of sin, its old connotation bringing back older memories, a revival meeting at Selma, a tent on the lot back of the Lowell block, red fire outside, hell fire within, a screaming, screeching preacher again and again chanting the words, "Sin, sin, sin no more, ye Sinners." He had not been a sinner. Evil had crept on its slimy belly toward him, forcing him to join—he was still amused—the devil's masquerade.
Here, for instance, in the old frame house, no one had ever heard of "the other world." Inconceivable idea, in the high lighted spring morning, with its fringe of fleece-white clouds, hovering a moment, then hastening away. Inconceivable, indeed, was any life save the simple life, toil,
