could never take it from his own. And, aside from his
insuperable physical reluctance, another motive restrained him.
He was possessed by the dogged desire to establish the truth of
his story. He refused to be swept aside as an irresponsible
dreamer--even if he had to kill himself in the end, he would not
do so before proving to society that he had deserved death from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first
had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled
by a brief statement from the District Attorney's office, and the
rest of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to
see him, and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and
tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful
of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell,
and set a guard on his lips. But the words he kept back
engendered others and still others in his brain. His inner self
became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long hours
reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime,
which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his
activity languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of
being buried beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a
passion of resentment he swore that he would prove himself a
murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to do it; and
for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on his
darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining impulse
was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim. . .
So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose
the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he
tried to pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity.
But every issue seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued