None would do it gentlier. You give me release from
pain, you alone. And you promise everlasting release. I will remember
you if it comes to that."

The pool looked up to him out of deep evening shadows cast upon it by
the woods. There was something human in the variety of its expression.
As if a chained soul, silenced forever as to speech, condemned to a
garment of water, struggled to reach a human heart by infinite shades of
beauty, and endless variations of sound. The thought woke his pity, and
he looked down at the water as one looks into the face of a suffering
friend. Here were two castaways, cut off from the highway of life,
imprisoned in circumstances as firmly as if behind prison grills. For
him there was hope, for the pool nothing. At this moment its calm face
pictured profound sadness. The black shadow of the woods lay deep on the
west bank, but its remotest edge showed a brilliant green, where the sun
lingered on the top fringes of the foliage. Along the east bank, among
the reeds, the sun showed crimson, and all the tender colors of the
water plants faded in a glare of blood. This savage brilliance would
soon give way to the gray mist of twilight, and then to the darkness of
night. Even this poor dumb beauty reflected in its helplessly beautiful
way the tragedies of mankind.

As before with the evening came peace and release from pain. Again he
sat on Martha's porch after supper, and thought nothing so beautiful as
life; and as he listened to further details of her life-story, imparted
with the wise intention of binding him to life more securely, he felt
that all was not yet lost for him. In his little room while the night
was still young, he opened an old volume at the play of Hamlet and
read the story through. Surely he had never read this play before? He
recalled vaguely that it had been studied in college, that some great
actor had played it for him, that he had believed it a wonderful thing;
memories now less real than dreams. For in reading it this night he
entered into the very soul of Hamlet, lived his tortures over again,
wept and raved in dumb show with the wretched prince, and flung himself
and his book to the floor in grief at the pitiful ending. He was the
Hamlet; youth with a problem of the horrible; called to solve that which
shook the brains of statesmen; dying in utter failure with that most
pathetic dread of a wounded name.

Oh, good Horatio, what a wounded name.
Things standin