The weeks passed. After Vance's regulation twenty-four hours at Friendship House he was recommended to a rooming house which was certainly as respectable as they had promised, but offered few other attractions, at least in hot weather. During those first lonely suffocating days and nights Vance's weak body and sore spirit yearned for his neat room at home, the glitter of the bath, the shade of the Mapledale Avenue trees. But since he was determined to hold on till he got a job he dared not risk taking a better room; and the thought of going home was more hateful than his present misery. Yet loneliness was the core of that misery; incessant gnawing loneliness of mind and heart. He was benumbed by the feeling that in the huge wilderness of people about him not one had ever heard of him, or would take the least interest in his case if he should appeal for understanding; not one would care a straw that within him all the forces of the universe were boiling. He felt the same desolation, the sense of life being over for him, as when he had staggered down the passage to his parents' room and groped for the absent revolver… .

But the returning tide of vitality did not mount as rapidly as it had then. The situation was different. Then he had made up his mind to wait till life gave him another chance; and life had given him that chance—magnificently—and what had he made of it? His rage against Mrs. Tracy, against Upton and the Spears, was a mere passing flare-up; it soon gave place to a lasting sense of failure. He had been at fault, and he only. Upton was a sly little fool, but he, Vance, was the older of the two, and being the more experienced should have been the stronger. He should have resisted the temptation to loaf and drink with those wasters and flashy girls, should have remembered his promise to Mrs. Tracy to come home with Upton after the game. If he had, everything might have been different, for early the next morning he would have hurried back to the Willows, have noticed that the books were gone, and perhaps prevented his own disgrace and Miss Spear's unhappiness… . He could not forget how unhappy she had looked when it first flashed on her that her brother had probably taken the books. Vance ached with that more than his own wretchedness. His only comfort was that he had seen at once what was passing through her mind, had caught her signal and obeyed it. He knew she had perceived this, and been grateful; and the fact that she had sacrificed him to her brother did not offend him—it seemed to create a new tie between them… .