“Ah, well, perhaps the onlookers, in some cases, see the most of the game. But you must admit that it affords an admirable and sufficient excuse for to-day's little episode—the only excuse indeed (this a little more sharply)—but an excuse that we all of us—I speak for others as well as myself—are only too ready to seize. A holiday, my friend, a holiday—there we have our doctor's medicine.” Out of the waters of misery that were closing about him the man raised his head. Of all the many things that had come upon him this was the worst. He faced it with despair—he knew as he heard the other man's words pour along like a river that he had nothing to say. How could he make a fine rebel when the day before yesterday he had been assisting and abetting? How could he make a fine rebel when they all thought that he was merely overdone? How could he make a fine rebel when instead of the terror that he thought that he had brought he found only a gentle contempt and the opinion that he was tired and needed a holiday? Somewhere, in the back attics of his brain, something was telling him that this was not quite so simple as it appeared—that this old man in his dark room was playing as elaborate a game as did ever Philip II in the dark recesses of his palace at Madrid. And he saw, \ although his head was buzzing, that there was, in that plan, good wisdom of a kind. To have Perrin back again, in the chains of the old familiar authority, was to have Perrin silenced, humbled—finally quieted. But how was he to battle with these things? They were too clever for him; he knew that the accumulated years of tradition behind him, the heaping together of those many, many times when he had knocked on that study door, the solemn consciousness of the obsequious attentions that he had so often paid to that white beard, these things rose and defeated him—defeated him on the last occasion that the chances of battle were to be offered him. Yet he tried to say something. He spoke in a tired, passionless voice. “I had reason,” he said slowly, “for what I did. I meant what I said and I mean it now. You have made this place hateful to all of us and I want to hand in my resignation now. I had hoped that what I did this afternoon might have brought matters to a head, might have helped us all to act together as a body. But they 're jealous of me—if anyone else had done it—” His head dropped—his voice ceased. Then he repeated, drearily, “I want to hand in my resignation.” The clock ticked on solemnly. At last Moy-Thompson spoke, very gently and a little sadly: