of the desk, and the wood of this last gaping in a great gash. He had certainly failed.
****
There is no soul so strong but defeat will check it for a moment. All the long hours remaining of that day, even when he had eaten food and drunk wine, he despaired of any issue.
As darkness closed in on him he raised the energy to get the bed down on to the floor again. He made it up as best he could (the sheets were clean, the pillows comfortable), and he slept.
Upon the Wednesday morning he woke—but now I must play a trick upon the reader, lest worse should befall him. I must beg him to allow the lapse of that Wednesday, and to consider the Professor rising with the first faint dawn of Thursday. Why they should keep him thus confined, how long they intended to do so, whether those fiendish youngsters were determined upon his slow starvation and death, what was happening to that miserable cheque and therefore to his future peace of mind through the whole term of his life, where he was, by what means, if any, he might be restored to the companionship of his kind—all these things did the
