"If the war was to begin all over again I fancy Harry'd be in it next time," he said. "Speaking for myself, I should say it worried him. Got it on his mind like. Maybe it's that that's stopped him going about very much except to a few places. Sometimes you'd think he'd quarreled with the whole world." "From the little I've seen of him I can't say I found him a prepossessing young man," I observed. "Well, myself, I can't help feeling a bit sorry for him," the old man continued, with a shake of his head. "Many a man without a leg's happier than what Harry is. He isn't even the man he was two or three weeks ago. He thinks everybody's got their knife into him. Nor that inquest he was on didn't do him much good neither. He's moped and muttered about it ever since. Talks to himself, he does, up and down the streets and play-acts dreadful things he's going to do, as you might say. Says he won't stand this and that and the other. Any little thing sets him off. Then there was that about that bullet. I expect Mr. Esdaile told you about that?" "Yes." "Well, he goes clean off his head about that sometimes. Has the kids downstairs--fetches 'em out of bed--and makes 'em tell him it all over and over again. Says somebody tried to murder 'em. Oh, and a whole lot more nonsense. What he ought to do is to get away into the country for a bit, but when the doctor tells him that, he glares and says it's all a conspiracy to get him out of the way so things can be hushed up." "What things?" "Oh, I can't tell you half the rubbish. I keep out of his way now--go somewhere else. I like to have my glass of whisky in peace, not with all this muttering and fist-shaking going on. Yes, he ought to get away for a bit." "You say a doctor's attending him?" "Well, he is and he isn't, in a manner of speaking. The doctor goes round--Doctor Dobbie of Carlyle Square he is--but Harry won't do what he tells him, so he might just as well be without one. He'll neither go to bed nor get about his business, as you might say. He's got a couch pulled up to the bedroom window, and he sits there by the hour together staring out. That's the bedroom where the bullet came in. And he writes scores of letters, but I don't think his missis posts all of them. They're to all sorts of people. He gets 'em out of directories." "What are the letters about?" "All about miscarriage of justice, and one law for the rich and another for the poor, and lots of them's to the newspapers. Oh, he's going downhill is Harry, I'm afraid. Downhill he's going. He was never any particular friend of mine, but it isn't a pleasant thing to see a man you've chatted with over your glass of whisky going downhill. Not much more than a boy by the side of me neither. I can give him getting on for forty years." I mused for a moment; then: "You said something about his not being sympathetic to Mr. Rooke. What do you mean by that exactly?"