nd to look into your statement--"

Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby wouldn't
have said that if he hadn't believed him!

"That's all right. Then I needn't detain you. I can be found at any time
at my apartment." He gave the address.

The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. "What do you say to
leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I'm giving a little supper
at Rector's--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose--I
think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you'll join us..."

Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had
made.

He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror. During the
first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham's alienist dogged him; and as
that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal
had made no impression on the District Attorney. Evidently, if he had
been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from
before now.... And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly
enough how little the story had impressed him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate
himself. He was chained to life--a "prisoner of consciousness." Where
was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In
the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited
by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable
SELFNESS, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation
he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own
dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the
feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands
and face, and in his throat--and as his brain cleared he understood that
it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like
some thick viscous substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of
his window at the awakening activities of the street--at the
street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers
flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light. Oh, to be one of
them--any of them--to take his chance in any of their skins! They were
the toilers--the men whose lot was pitied--the victims wept over and
ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he would have
taken up