There were not many methods of revenge open to a man of his age, rheumatic and stiff in one arm; but he tried to enlist and was rejected. He felt that something must be done, and all that he had left was his brain. Alone in his deserted house with the memory of his dead wife and child, he sat for hours brooding on these vindictive thoughts; and like a beast shaking the bars of its cage, waiting for the chance to spring, his mind raged furiously against the inhibitions the war put upon him with its iron circle of the trenches. The clamours of the press drew his attention to Clerambault's articles which were intensely distasteful to him. The idea of snatching his precious hatred away from between his teeth! From the slight acquaintance that he had with Clerambault before the war, he felt an antipathy for him; as a writer, on account of the new form of his art, and as a man for numerous reasons: his love of life, and other men, his democratic ideals, his rather silly optimism, and his European aspirations. At the very first glance, with the instinct of a rheumatic in mind and body, Vaucoux had classed Clerambault as one of those pestilent persons who open doors and windows and make a draught in that closed house, his Country. That is, as he understood the term, in his mind there could be no other. After this there was no need for the vociferations of the papers; in the author of "The Appeal to the Living," and the "Pardon from the Dead," he saw at once an agent of the enemy, and with his thirst for revenge, he knew the opportunity had come.