let you sleep? The time came when you HAD to make a clean breast
of it?"

"I had to. Can't you understand?"

The reporter struck his fist on the table. "God, sir! I don't
suppose there's a human being with a drop of warm blood in him
that can't picture the deadly horrors of remorse--"

The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him
for the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a
conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most
adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing
motive, the difficulties of the case became so many incentives to
effort.

"Remorse--REMORSE," he repeated, rolling the word under his
tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the
popular drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself: "If I
could only have struck that note I should have been running in
six theatres at once."

He saw that from that moment McCarren's professional zeal would
be fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to
propose that they should dine together, and go on afterward to
some music-hall or theatre. It was becoming necessary to Granice
to feel himself an object of pre-occupation, to find himself in
another mind. He took a kind of gray penumbral pleasure in
riveting McCarren's attention on his case; and to feign the
grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately engrossing game.