He pressed Stuart's arm and spoke in low tones:
"I've made some big mistakes in my life, my boy. I'm just beginning to see them. I've read a new message in the flutter of this poor fellow's pulse. I'll not be slow to heed it."
But Stuart stood watching with growing wonder Harriet's deft little hand brush the damp hair back from the poor disfigured face.
CHAPTER XV
CONFESSION
The face of the dying boy haunted the doctor's imagination. With his eyes closed or open, at noon or alone at night the pity and the horror of his lonely death gripped him. A boy of twenty, weak, hungry, ragged, alone, had dared to lift his thin arm above his head and charge the entrenched authority of the civilized world.
Was he, with other theorists, responsible for the mad act?
He began to think that Tolstoy is right in his assertion that human progress is a march of ideas—and that the day of revolution by bloodshed has passed. He began to fear that his struggle with Bivens in his long-drawn and fiercely contested lawsuit was an act of the same essential quality of blind physical violence. He began to see that the real motive back of his struggle was hatred of the man—this little counter jumper, who had destroyed his business. It was the irony of such a fate that sunk its poisoned dagger into his heart. He faced the fact at last without flinching.
He rose and paced the floor of his library for a half-hour with measured tread. He stopped suddenly and clenched his big fists instinctively.