nsequences. Even so,
though, things must be different when the minds of people had
readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.

And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
in a silent paean of thanksgiving.

Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
all those years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
travesty on sleep his sleep had been, first reading until a heavy
physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours
of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of
his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from
the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
worse--the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
night he would sleep--sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
friendly, comforting dark.

Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that
he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
grotes