“See here,” said the night clerk, appraising him, as the day clerk had done, as a rube who had been seldom to the city and was nervous about fire, “you don't need to be worried. If anything should happen near here we'd get all the guests out in a jiffy.” The old party returned to his room. He was up early the next morning and down to breakfast before the dining room was open. He did not look as if he had had much rest. The morning hours he devoted to reading his Bible in his room. Perhaps he found comfort in it. At noon he seemed a bit more cheerful. He asked the clerk the way to the Eden Musee, and was surprised to learn that that place of amusement had been closed for a year or two. The clerk recommended a moving-picture house round the corner. But it had begun to rain and snow and sleet all together; the sky was dark and the wind was rising; the old party elected not to go out after all. He went back to his room once more, and his black fear and melancholy descended upon him again, and the old debate began to weave through his brain anew. For two weeks he had been fleeing from the debate and from himself. He had come to New York to get away from it, but it was no good. Just when he had made up his mind that God had forgiven him, and was experiencing a momentary respite, some new doubt would assail him and the agony would begin again. The old debate--he had burned the store, with the living quarters over it, to get the insurance money, after having removed a part of the insured goods, but he did not regard that as an overwhelming sin. It wasn't right, of course, in one way. And yet in another way it was merely sharp business practice, so he told himself. For a year before that, when one of his buildings had burned through accident, he had been forced to accept from the same insurance company less than was actually due him as a matter of equity. Therefore, to make money out of that company by a shrewd trick was in a way merely to get back his own again. It wasn't the sort of thing that a deacon in the church would care to have found out on him, of course. It was wrong in a sense. But it was the wrong that it had led to that worried him. It was the old woman's death that worried him. He hadn't meant to burn her to death, God knows! He hadn't known she was in the building. He had sent her on a week's visit to another town, to see a surprised cousin of his own, and it had been distinctly understood that she was not to return until Saturday. But some time on Friday evening she must have crept back home and gone to bed in her room. He had not known she was there. “I didn't know! I didn't know!” There were times when he gibbered the words to himself by the hour.