Henry lingered on the stairs and looked about the ghostly rooms. Beams of moonlight came in through the windows and touched this and that machine. He felt himself attuned to all the trouble, the disaster, in the universe. Life was a tragic disappointment. Nothing ever came right. People didn't succeed; they struggled and struggled to breast a mighty, tireless current that swept them ever backward. Poor old Hump! He had put money into this shop. All the little he had; or nearly all. And into the technical library that lined his bedroom walls upstairs. His daily work at the _Voice_ office was just a grind, to keep body and soul together while the experiments were working out. Hump was patient. 'Until I moved in here,' Henry thought, with a disturbingly passive sort of' bitterness, 'and brought girls and things. He doesn't have his nights and Sundays for work any more. Hump could do big things, too.' He went on up the stairs and switched on the lights in the living-room. He caught sight of his face in a mirror. It was white. There was a look of strain about the eyes. The little moustache, turned up at the ends, mocked him. 'I'll shave it off,' he said aloud. He even got out his razor and began nervously stropping it. He was alarmed to discover that his control of his hands was none too good. They moved more quickly than he meant them to, and in jerks. Too, the notion of shaving his moustache struck him weakness, an impulse to be resisted. Too much like retreating. Subtly like that. He put the razor back in its drawer. In the centre of the living-room rug, standing there, stiffly, he said:-- 'I'll face them. I'll go down fighting. They shan't say I surrendered.' He walked round and round the room. He had never in his life felt anything like this jerky nervousness. A restlessness that wouldn't permit him so much as to sit down. While in the _Gleaner_ office he had hardly been aware of McGibbon. He certainly hadn't listened to him. But now, like a blow, everything McGibbon had said came to him. Every syllable. Suddenly he could see the man, towering ever him, pounding his desk. Talking--talking--full of fresh hopes while the world crumbled around him. More disaster! It was the buzzing song of the old globe as it spun endlessly on its axis. Disaster!... The advertisers had at last combined against the paper. Old Weston had called McGibbon's note. That must have taken about the last of Henry's thousand. They were broke. His hand brushed his coat pocket. It bulged with copy paper. He must have thrust it back there absently, at the office. He drew it out and gazed at it. It was curious; he seemed to see it as a printed page, with a title at the top, and his name. He couldn't see what the title was. Yet it was there, and it was good.