n and acid, a vindictive rat. Unable to
cow the insolent in present and full-blooded rage, he fell to thinking
of the great machine he might set in motion to destroy him. As he sat
there in silence, his eyes grew ferrety, and a sleek revenge peeped from
the corners of his mouth. "I'll show him what I'll do to him for this!"
is a translation of his thought. He was thinking, with great
satisfaction to himself, of how the Senatus would deal with young
Gourlay.

Gourlay grew weak with fear the moment the words escaped him. They had
been a thunderclap to his own ears. He had been thinking them, but--as
he pleaded far within him now--had never meant to utter them; they had
been mere spume off the surge of cowardly wrath seething up within him,
longing to burst, but afraid. It was the taunt of stupidity that fired
his drunken vanity to blurt them forth.

The lecturer eyed him sideways where he shrank in fear. "You may go," he
said at last. "I will report your conduct to the University."

* * * * *

Gourlay was sitting alone in his room when he heard that he had been
expelled. For many days he had drunk to deaden fear, but he was sober
now, being newly out of bed. A dreary ray of sunshine came through the
window, and fell on a wisp of flame blinking in the grate. As Gourlay
sat, his eyes fixed dully on the faded ray, a flash of intuition laid
his character bare to him. He read himself ruthlessly. It was not by
conscious effort; insight was uncanny and apart from will. He saw that
blatancy had joined with weakness, morbidity with want of brains; and
that the results of these, converging to a point, had produced the
present issue, his expulsion. His mind recognized how logical the issue
was, assenting wearily as to a problem proved. Given those qualities, in
those circumstances, what else could have happened? And such a weakling
as he knew himself to be could never--he thought--make effort sufficient
to alter his qualities. A sense of fatalism came over him, as of one
doomed. He bowed his head, and let his arms fall by the sides of his
chair, dropping them like a spent swimmer ready to sink. The sudden
revelation of himself to himself had taken the heart out of him. "I'm a
waster!" he said aghast. And then, at the sound of his own voice, a fear
came over him, a fear of his own nature; and he started to his feet and
strode feverishly, as if by mere locomotion, to escape from his clinging
and inhe