From one to another he went, despairingly yet without thought of surrender, coming to expect their glances of surprise, followed sometimes by alarm, and again by something akin to pity. He accepted these various expressions as they came, entirely unable to account for them, realizing only that one after another of those he approached on the subject appeared to have a strange antipathy to hearing anything about the hypothetical cases he hit on to try them with, and hurried away from him at the first available opportunity. * * * * * It was impossible that the night, when it came, should be anything but a distressing one for Haworth. Though approaching people about his machine had come, in this short space of time, to be about as enjoyable as so many executions for murder, the poor fellow would rather have gone on with it than lie helpless while his mind grappled with his monstrous predicament. After a time, when the torture of the thing passed the point of endurance, he would stagger blindly to his feet and stride about at a tremendous pace, having no realization of where he was. This happened several times during the night. The morning saw him out again with his white, emaciated face and threadbare clothing, going mechanically from one place to another in his vain search for some one he could rely on as a purchaser—a most doubtful enterprise at the best, but put in the perfectly hopeless class by his eccentric management of it, together with his disturbing appearance and behavior. He hunted up several speculators who had once been friendly with old Mr. Cripps, and quite frequently, in those days, guests at the house; he went to Mr. Trescott and even to the manager of the bank with which he had had some modest dealings in time gone by. But there wasn’t one of those he approached with his misguided efforts to test them out, who was not quite convinced, after listening to him a moment, that the poor fellow was mildly insane. Mr. Trescott was quite saddened by it, yet hardly surprised. The day following was Sunday, and after a hideous night of despair he had fallen into a sort of stupor that lasted until the middle of the afternoon. When he finally roused himself from it (he had been sitting in a chair since the night before) the realization of his dreadful dilemma came upon him with appalling intensity, and he went to pacing about the house in a manner that filled Mrs. Temple with a new alarm. There was a frantic desperation about it that terrified the old woman, and it was some time before she got her courage up to speak to him. She finally succeeded in waylaying him in the narrow back hall, but he strode past without appearing to see her, crowding her against the side wall as he did so, but of course without any idea of what he was doing.