Unable to sleep that night, he rose before sun-up on the following morning and walked through the quiet streets for two hours. What a mad, futile thing the waking city seemed! "What are these people living for--what, after all?" he asked. "But they may be happy in a way," he added. "The fault is in me. I am seeing them through self-stained glasses. It wasn't like this in my sight once--the town was a sort of heaven when I first entered it and began to attract attention. Yes, I am at fault. I have disobeyed a spiritual law, and am getting my dues. What is the use of holding out longer? I see now that I am beaten. I have got to do this thing, and be done with it." After breakfast he went straight to the bank. Wright, Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business!" That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed like forgotten enemies rising to stop him. How could Delbridge smile in his smug way, as he chewed his cigar and boasted of a new club of which he was the president? How could Wright put up with his moderate salary and stand all day at that prison window? What could the limp, pale-faced stenographers in their simple dresses hope for? Did they expect to marry, bear children, nurse them at their thin breasts--and bury them like close-clipped flowers of Heaven just opening to fragrance? Seated at his desk, he asked a clerk to go to the vault and bring him his certificates of bank stock. Delbridge was passing, and, seeing them in his hands, he said, with his forced and commercial shrewdness: "If you have any idea of selling out, Mostyn, I'm in a shape now to take that stock off your hands." Mostyn's stare resolved itself into a glare of indecision. "What would be your price?" he asked, under his breath, and yet audibly--"that is, in case I--I found another use for the money?" "The same price I gave Saunders," Delbridge answered. "You couldn't expect to make a better deal than that long-headed chap. If you really want to do this thing you'd better act at once. I have another plan on hand." "You make it as an offer?" Mostyn asked. "Yes." "Then the stock is yours," Mostyn answered. "Figure it up and place the money to my credit. I may check it out to-day. I am thinking of leaving town." Delbridge suppressed a glow of triumph in his eyes as he took the certificates into his hands. He spread the crisp sheets out on the desk. "Indorse them while the pen is handy," he suggested. Mostyn dipped the pen and wrote steadily on the backs of the certificates. "That's O. K.," Delbridge mumbled, dropping his cigar into a cuspidor. "Now I'll credit your account with the money. Check on it when you like."