“I’d really no notion how bad it was with Maurice,” Cecil hastened to say. “It must have been deadly when it drove him to shoot himself.”
“Something beyond description, I should say,” Sir Clinton said, gravely.
He glanced over the wide prospects of the park and then raised his eyes to where great luminous clouds were sailing in stately procession across the blue.
“Looks peaceful, Cecil, doesn’t it? Makes one rather glad to be alive, when one gets into a scene like this. And yet, to poor Maurice it was a mere torture-chamber of nausea and torment, a horror that drove him to burrowing into holes and crannies, anywhere to escape from the terrors of the open sky. I don’t suppose that we normal people can even come near the thing in our imaginations. It’s too rum for our minds—outside everything we know. Poor devil! No wonder he went off the rails a bit in the end.”
Transcriber’s Notes
This transcription follows the text of the edition published by Grosset & Dunlap in February, 1928. However, the following alterations have been made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous errors in the text:
- “usally” was corrected to “usually” (Chapter I).
- “sufficent” was corrected to “sufficient” (Chapter I).
- “inqiringly” was corrected to “inquiringly” (Chapter I).
- “deadful” was corrected to “dreadful” (Chapter II).
- “artifical” was corrected to “artificial” (Chapter II).
- “reassurred” was corrected to “reassured” (Chapter III).
- “even since” was corrected to “ever since” (Chapter IV).
- “That’s was” was corrected to “That was” (Chapter VI).
- “her’s” was corrected to “hers” (Chapter IX).
- “lot’s of” was corrected to “lots of” (Chapter XI).
- “Froggart” was corrected to “Froggatt” (Chapter XIII).
- “spiney” was corrected to “spinney” (Chapter XIV).
- “orginal” was corrected to “original” (Chapter XIV).
- “out of question” was corrected to “out of the question” (Chapter XV).
- Three occurrences of mismatched quotation marks were repaired.
- One occurrence of a missing em dash was repaired.