“Is that you, McGaw? Just sit down and wait a minute.” When his revolving chair finally did swing round, the transition was something very awful. Sears, in spite of his birth, and his bringing up, and his money, was, at times, to put it kindly, exceedingly “near to nature;” just now he behaved as one might fancy a naked Zulu behaving were an electric car or a steam-roller to dart suddenly across his path in the depths of an African jungle. He jerked back as if somebody had made a lunge at him, and held on to the arms of his chair. Then he looked quickly from side to side, at the door and windows, with his mouth open stupidly. His eyes, round, rounder, helpless, turned again and again to that dapper butterfly in the chair opposite, who got redder and redder until all the blood in his body boiled through his face and away, leaving him white, rigid, terrible. And Sears could make no sound, only a gasping effort, until all at once the entire situation seemed to gather fresh force and smite him anew. He stumbled from his chair, through the door, down the long hall, down the stairs, laughing, shrieking, cursing like a maniac, out into the street. IV Sears found Haydock studying at the club, and dragged him out of his chair, upstairs to a vacant room, and shut the door. Then he paced the floor like a caged lion, holding his hands to his head and exclaiming, whenever he could stop laughing long enough, that he had lost his mind. Every now and then, when words refused to come, he expressed himself by leaning against the wall, with his back to Haydock, and kicking the air behind him. Sometimes he pounded the door with his clenched fist. Haydock waited. “I’ll never get over this,” Sears declared, “not if I live to be a hundred.” “Well, don’t tell it backwards,” objected Haydock; “begin at the beginning.” “There isn’t any beginning,” roared Sears; “it never began, I just looked around and found it there; it had been there all the time; you’ve seen it yourself.” He sat on the floor and rocked to and fro. “I’m almost inclined to believe that you _have_ lost your mind,” remarked Haydock. “Just wait, just wait! You’ll be a gibbering idiot yourself when I tell you, only you’ll not believe me! You can’t believe me! I don’t believe it myself! Oh, if you’d only been there!--if you could have seen him! I was writing a letter at my desk when he came in, and told him to sit down. I didn’t even notice him, or what he had on, or anything; and when I turned around--when I turned around--” Wolcott gasped--“when I turned around, I thought it would be McGaw!” “Oh, go on, who was it?” “It _was_ McGaw! I’ll never get over the shock of it.” Haydock wrinkled his forehead at this clew. “Can’t you guess? Don’t you know? Doesn’t something tell you? Try, try! think of the only person in college he could be, if he weren’t himself. Think of the only way I could have found out, the thing that made the difference--the--”