He sprang up. He knew quite well what this meant. Cowardice! If he got into the post-office, he would stay there forever.... He started abruptly toward the house, leaving Tom in the midst of an anecdote of old Chicago days. He had left the map on Tom’s desk. His novel was in that same desk. If he started reading that novel again, he might decide to stay in Port Royal and finish it. He wondered whether the map or the novel would claim him when he sat down at that desk. Five minutes at that desk might decide his whole future for him.... He went into Tom’s room, went over to the desk—and from a letter lying open beside the pen-tray there flashed up to him his own name, _Felix Fay_ ... with a fringe of words about it. Those words startled him, and he bent over the letter to make sure that they were really there; he read them, and turned to see the signature—it was that of Madge Alden; and then he sat down in Tom’s chair and read slowly that paragraph of three sentences. “_Is that nasty young man Felix Fay really a friend of yours? I think he’d better leave Port Royal quick. The story of that horrible chapter is all over town and—well, if you knew the things Gloria is saying about him!_” So Gloria had betrayed him to Port Royal. 4 He sank back in his chair, amazed at his sensations. He had never thought any written words could affect him like that. He had never cared what people thought.... It was absurd. He felt as though a cannon-ball had gone through his abdomen. He sat there, weak, stunned, gasping for breath—with a mind curiously detached, floating somewhere above that stunned body, wondering.... It was curious that anything in the world could hurt so much. Then, in a rush, all his energy seemed to come back, flooding and filling his body—as if to provide him the strength with which to return blow for blow. And that superfluity of strength was worse than the weakness had been—for there was no one, nothing to fight. Words out of the air had hurt him, and he could not fight back. The emotion which flooded him ebbed at last, leaving him in a curious mood of utter coldness. The thought came into his mind: “Nothing that ever happens to me can hurt me after this—nothing.” He opened the drawer. He wanted to see that unfinished novel. He wanted to know what it was really like. He felt capable of judging it calmly. He turned the pages here and there, reading at random, now with affection and now with contempt, making up his mind.... He suddenly realized that he was feeling ashamed of it all. He did not realize that this new humiliation, at the hands of a girl, had awakened painful memories of the love-affair which he had celebrated in this novel, and which had ended so differently in real life from the way it was to end in this book; he only knew that he was ashamed. The style, he said to himself, was bad—very bad.