And yet that could not be: it was a confession only in the event of his death.
Living, he knew that he would never send that letter.
His conscience, however, was entirely another affair.

He could neither stifle nor deaden that.

It was always jabbing him with white-hot barbs, waking or sleeping.

But it never said: "Tell someone! Tell someone!" Was he something of a moral pervert, then?
Was it what he had lost--the familiar world--rather than what he had done?
He stared dully at the footrail.

For the present the desire to fly was gone.