e walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness
returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham
he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been
carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action.
Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood
on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked
himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in
the sluggish circle of his consciousness.

The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh
recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take
it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance,
another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire
to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as
an irresponsible dreamer--even if he had to kill himself in the end,
he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death
from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had
been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a
brief statement from the District Attorney's office, and the rest of his
communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged
him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of
his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread
the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the
words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain.
His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long
hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime,
which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity
languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried
beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he
swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit
another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought
flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining
impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his
victim... So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose
the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to
pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the who