The men he met on the street he greeted as creatures from another world.
Yet he knew he smiled and spoke with them casually. But it was not he
who spoke; the real Robert Hendricks he knew was separated from the
pantomime about him. When he went into the bank at five o'clock, the
janitor was finishing his work. Hendricks called up the depot on the
telephone and found that No. 6 was an hour late. With the realization
that a full hour of his fighting time had been taken from him and that
the train would arrive only a scant hour before the meeting, the Adrian
face of his puzzle turned insistently toward Hendricks. It was not fear
but despair that seized him. The cloud was over him. And for want of
something to do he wrote. First he wrote abstractedly and mechanically
to John Barc
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