There was now, he told himself, no use of evading or denying it longer; right or wrong, things had come to a point with him where anything but the truth was unbearable; it was there, like a live thing with him in the room, and out in the court, too,--almost as if he could put out his hand and draw it in close to him. Freedom, that was it. His lips made the word noiselessly, again and again, fascinated with the sensation. "Free, free," he kept whispering, stretching out his hands greedily, drawing in full breaths of the late September air. "I'm glad, that's all there is to it--glad. I can't help being glad--I've tried, too, but now, to-day, it's bound to come out. Glad! It's like being let out of school." That word--school--brought him back sharply. It seemed to precipitate all the old worry in the solution that but a moment ago was so clear. He came back hesitatingly from the window and threw himself down before the desk again, unable to restrain something he vaguely named his conscience from its weary accusations. "It's an awful thing. It's true, it is. I'm a beast. I'm all wrong to be like this. It's a terrible thing to be glad a person is--" He shivered as he withheld the end of the sentence, though he realized his cowardice in so withholding. "And that person your--" Again he hesitated. Haldane, by the desk, was a figure to make, involuntarily, demands on one's sympathy. It seemed all his life--perhaps thirty years long--he had been doing this in one way or another, and by no effort of his. People had a fashion of "looking out for him." Not that he had grown up particularly incapable or helpless; it might rather have been due to a certain appealing gentleness of bearing, something that was the resultant of a half-shy manner, expanding into boyish confidence winningly; a shortish, slender figure, scarcely robust; eager, friendly brown eyes behind his glasses; and a keen desire to be liked. It might be seen, in the present sharp nervous play of emotion over his face, how utterly he was unsuited to the weight of mental discomfort,--how it fretted and galled him. That he was a gentleman, and by nature of a morbidly just and fair disposition, only made his present distress the more intolerable to him. "Lord God," he muttered, hopelessly, "why, _why_ had it all to be?" And this question might, in the end, be taken as an aimless appeal to the Almighty to know why He had deliberately led him into a wretchedly miserable condition of mind and left him there.