An attendant was moving about.  “You sleep in the first dormitory to-night,” he explained to Fred.  “It’s at the end of the hall.”

Fred turned away in fresh despair.

Before the door of the first dormitory a number of men were undressing.  Monet was in the group and a newspaper man named Clancy that Fred had met that afternoon.  Fred stood a moment in indecision.

“You’ll have to strip out here,” Monet said, in a matter-of-fact tone.  “Just leave your clothes in a pile close against the wall.”

Fred obeyed.  The rest of the company regarded him with sinister curiosity.  Except for Monet and Clancy all seemed obviously insane.  One by one they filed into the room.  Fred followed.  Twelve spotlessly clean cots gleamed in the twilight.

The twelve men crawled into bed; the door was shut with a bang.  Fred heard a key turn...  They were locked in!

The ghostly day faded and night settled in.  Fitful snorings and groans and incoherent mutterings broke the stillness.  At intervals a man near the door would jump to his feet, proclaiming the end of the world.  Sometimes his paroxysm was brief, but again he would keep up his leaping and solemn chanting until he fell to the floor in sheer exhaustion...  Gradually even he became quiet, and nothing was audible except heavy breathing and the sound of the watchman in the corridor as he passed by regularly, flashing his light into the room through the slits in the door.

Fred Starratt did not close his eyes.

CHAPTER XIII

The first week passed in an inferno of idleness.  Fred Starratt grew to envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs.  There once had been a time in his life when ambition had pricked him with a desire for affluent ease...  He had been grounded in the religious conviction that work had been wished upon a defenseless humanity as a curse.  He still remembered his Sabbath-school stories, particularly the scornful text with which the Lord had banished those two erring souls from Eden.  Henceforth they were to work!  To earn their bread by the sweat of their brows!  He had a feeling now that either God had been tricked into granting a boon or else the scowl which had accompanied the tirade had been the scowl that a genial Father threw at his children merely for the sake of seeming impressive.  At heart the good Lord must have had only admiration for these two souls who refused to be beguiled by all the slothful ease of Eden, preferring to take their chances in a world of their own making...  And he began to question, too, either the beauty or contentment of the heaven which offered the vacuous delights of idleness.  It seemed, perhaps, that the theologians had mixed their revelations, and that the paradise they offered so glibly was really a sinister hell in disguise.