all piled up on him and he didn't get up. He lay there,
looking so ghostly and breathing so harshly and with the trickle of
blood coming out of his ears. But Jeff didn't know they had stopped
laughing.

He recovered from that skull fracture, all right. Worse, though, than
any of the unhappiness he suffered during his life, worse even than
the shocks of his father's and mother's deaths, was the thing that
happened to him when he was twenty and working at the laboratories of
a big drug company.

He met and fell hopelessly in love with a girl named Nina, a girl a
few years older than he was. They married and for the first few weeks
Jeff McKinney had happiness he'd never known before. Until he came
home from work sick, one afternoon and saw Nina with the man from the
apartment over them. She didn't whine and beg for forgiveness, Nina
didn't. She stood boldly while the other man laughed and laughed and
she screamed invective upon Jefferson McKinney, telling him what she
really thought of him, a gloomy, puny weakling who couldn't even make
a decent living, telling him that she was through with him.

A blank spot came into Jeff's life right then. When it was over, Nina
and the other man were on the floor and there was blood on the kitchen
carving knife in Jeff's hand.

They didn't find him for awhile. He changed his name and appearance
and hid in the soiled seams and ragged fringes of society. He learned
the anaesthetic powers of drugs and alcohol. He gave up trying to get
anything out of this life. Then they finally picked him up, fished him
from the river into which he'd jumped. There were days of torture
after that, without the alcohol and drugs his wrecked system craved.
Right there was the final hell that could have broken him completely.
But it didn't. It was like the terrible crisis after a long illness.
Things began to get better, to go to the other extreme after that.

A state psychiatrist brought Jeff's case to the attention of a noted
criminal lawyer. Neither Nina nor her lover had died from their knife
wounds. On the plea of the unwritten law, Jeff McKinney got off with a
suspended sentence. The lawyer and psychiatrist learned of his
interest and knowledge and talent for chemistry and got him another
job in the experimental laboratory of a big university.

Later he married a girl named Elaine, who worked at the lab with him.
They had two children, and lived in a small comfortable cottage just
off the Univer