The two Yale students returned to college. In his luggage one of them found a reproduction of Andrea del Sarto's 'John the Baptist' with the note: 'John the Baptist was simple in life and dress, fearless in utterance and uncompromising with the shame and superficialities of his day. He was the forerunner of a new age. Yale needs a man like that, and I believe you are one who will pay the price and have the power.'22

In Rome Buchman received news that Dan, not quite 24, had died two days earlier in Paris. Although Dan had only come to live with the family after he had left to take up parish work, Buchman always said that, next to his mother and father, he loved Dan more than anyone in the world. Although, or because, he was good-looking and charming, life was always difficult for him, and Buchman had felt constantly responsible for him. His correspondence with Dan was continuous, even at his busiest times, and often included gifts of money, as well as advice to get his teeth fixed, obey the doctor, wear his overcoat and buckle down to studies. After Dan's failures at the Taft School and the technical school, he had enlisted in the army in 1917, where he developed what, at his death, was discovered to be a tubercular infection.

After demobilisation, an abortive job and a failed marriage, he wrote his brother in April 1920, 'I am leaving the United States to try my luck in a foreign country. I am sick and disheartened... I did not realise the money you gave me last summer represented your only reserve supply. I mean to pay it all back and more, so I must strike out.' He shipped as a merchant seaman to France and made three crossings. On the last of them he fell ill, and collapsed with double pneumonia in Paris.

In July Buchman wrote an affectionate letter to Dan in Paris, suggesting he come to be his secretary at Hartford - perhaps with the idea of finally spending enough time with him to be able to help him to find the faith they had so often corresponded about. He made a rendezvous with him at Thomas Cook's in Paris.23 Hurrying to Paris from Rome on receipt of the news, he found his letter uncollected at the poste restante.

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