The stories of Leonard Andreyev are built around characters whose lives have been formed by the machinations of a remorseless fate. Suffering is a monumental inevitability, and people are obliged to arrange their lives to accommodate it.

In this novella, an elderly man, who has endured a lengthy period of imprisonment for murder, relates how he has become reconciled with his incarceration. Prison has not made him bitter or robbed him of his intellectual acuity, but it may have put at risk his ability to function effectively as a free man after his release.