He looked about the room and hated it,—the old, shabby, hemmed-in thing! He hated this life to which he was condemned; he hated himself, his world, his uninspiring future. “My God, I must do something!... I _will_ do something!... But suppose I can’t!” His head fell again—suppose he were out in that other world, there in the heart of those dark forests, suppose that he found that he did no better there than here!... That would be, indeed, the most terrible thing of all! He gazed up into the Mirror, saw in it the reflection of the room, the green walls, the green carpet, the old faded green place like moss covering dead ground. Soft, damp, dark,—and beyond outside the Mirror, the world of the Forests—“the great expanse of Forests” and “beyond, the Ocean—smooth and polished ... rising up to the sky in a wall of steel.” His people, his family, his many, many relations, his world, he thought, were all inside the Mirror—all embedded in that green, soft, silent enclosure. He saw, stretching from one end of England to the other, in all Provincial towns, in neat little houses with neat little gardens, in Cathedral Cities with their sequestered Closes, in villages with the deep green lanes leading up to the rectory gardens, in old Country houses hemmed in by wide stretching fields, in little lost places by the sea, all these persons happily, peacefully sunk up to their very necks in the green moss. Within the Mirror this ... Outside the Mirror the rolling forests guarded by the shining wall of sea. His own family passed before him. His grandfather, his great-aunt Sarah, his mother and his father, Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, Uncle Tim, Millicent, Katherine.... He paused then. The book slipped away and fell on to the floor. Katherine ... dear Katherine! He did not care what she was! And then, swept by a fresh wave of feeling springing up, stretching his arms, facing the room, he did not care what _any_ of them were! _He_ was the Idiot, the discontented, ungrateful Idiot! He loved them all—he wouldn’t change one of them, he wouldn’t be in any other family in all the world! The door opened; in came old Rocket, the staff and prop of the family, to turn up the lights, to poke up the fire. In a minute tea would come in.... “Why, Mr. Henry, no fire nor lights!” He shuffled to the windows, pulling the great heavy curtains across them, his knees cracking, very slowly he bent down, picked up the book, and laid it carefully on the table next to the “Hibbert Journal.” “I hope you’ve not been reading, Mr. Henry, in this bad light,” he said. III