The District Attorney’s large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.

“Sorry, my dear fellow—­lot of people waiting.  Drop in on Stell some morning,” Allonby said, shaking hands.

McCarren had to own himself beaten:  there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi.  And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation.  For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell.  Why might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist’s diagnosis?  What if he were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor?  To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.

The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment to the conditions of their previous meeting.  “We have to do that occasionally, Mr. Granice; it’s one of our methods.  And you had given Allonby a fright.”

Granice was silent.  He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stell’s allusion.

“You think, then, it’s a case of brain-fag—­nothing more?”

“Nothing more.  And I should advise you to knock off tobacco.  You smoke a good deal, don’t you?”

He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or any form of diversion that did not—­that in short—­

Granice interrupted him impatiently.  “Oh, I loathe all that—­and I’m sick of travelling.”

“H’m.  Then some larger interest—­politics, reform, philanthropy?  Something to take you out of yourself.”

“Yes.  I understand,” said Granice wearily.

“Above all, don’t lose heart.  I see hundreds of cases like yours,” the doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed.  Hundreds of cases like his—­the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his guilt, and whom no one would believe!  Why, there had never been a case like it in the world.  What a good figure Stell would have made in a play:  the great alienist who couldn’t read a man’s mind any better than that!

Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness returned on him.  For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action.  Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle of his consciousness.