" I was speechless with wrath.
They went away then, and I could hear them going over the house.
At one o'clock Jim went up to bed, the last, and Mr. Harbison had
not been found. I did not see how they could go to bed at all. If
he had escaped, then Max was right and the whole thing was
heart-breaking. And if he had not, then he might be lying--
I got up and dressed.
The early part of the night had been cloudy, but when I got to
the roof it was clear starlight. The wind blew through the
electric wires strung across and set them singing. The occasional
bleat of a belated automobile on the drive below came up to me
raucously. The tent gleamed, a starlit ghost of itself, and the
boxwoods bent in the breeze. I went over to the parapet and
leaned my elbows on it. I had done the same thing so often
before; I had carried all my times of stress so infallibly to
that particular place, that instinctively my feet turned there.
And there in the starlight, I went over the whole serio-comedy,
and I loathed my part in it. He had been perfectly right to be
angry with me and with all of us. And I had been a hypocrite and
a Pharisee, and had thanked God that I was not as other people,
when the fact was that I was worse than the worst. And although
it wasn't dignified to think of him going down the drain pipe,
still--no one could blame him for wanting to get away from us,
and he was quite muscular enough to do it.
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