e old acquaintances of his
felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
role he for so long had worn?

He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it
came to him, registering emphatically.

As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.

Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
though, things must be different when the minds of people had
readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.

And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
in a silent paean of thanksgiving.

Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
all these years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
travesty on sleep his sleep had been, he reading until a heavy physical
weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours of the
night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of his
bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from the
footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
aching eyelids; and finally, towards