*

After such an adventure John Webster came home the next day feeling very mean and unclean. Still he did work better at the office and at night for a long time he slept better. For one thing he kept his mind on affairs and did not give way to dreams and to vague thoughts. When one was running a factory that was an advantage.

Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking perhaps he had better go off on such an adventure again. If he stayed at home and ill day and every day in the presence of Natalie Swartz there was no telling what would happen. One might, as well face facts. After his experience of that morning, his looking into her eyes in just the way he had, the life of the two people in the office would be changed. A new thing would have come into the very air they breathed together. It would be better if he did not go back to the office, but went off at once and took a train to Chicago or Milwaukee. As for his wife he had got that notion into his head of a kind of death of the flesh. He closed his eyes and leaned against the stair railing. His mind became a blank.

A door leading into the dining-room of the house opened and a woman stepped forth. She was the Webster's one servant and had been in the house for many years. Now she was past fifty and as she stood before John Webster he looked at her as he hadn't for a long time. A multitude of thoughts came quickly, like a handful of shot thrown against a window pane.

The woman standing before him was tall and lean and her face was marked by deep lines. It was an odd thing, the notions men had got into their heads about the beauty of women. Perhaps Natalie Swartz, when she was fifty, would look much like this woman.

Her name was Katherine and her coming to work for the Websters long ago had brought on a quarrel between John Webster and his wife. A young man of Indianapolis, who worked in a bank, had stolen a large sum of money and had run away with a woman who was a servant in his father's house. He had been killed in the wreck as he sat with the woman and all trace of him had been lost until someone from Indianapolis, quite by chance, saw and recognized Katherine on the streets of her adopted town. The question asked was, what had become of the stolen money, and Katherine had been accused of knowing and of concealing it.

Mrs Webster had wanted to discharge her at once and there had been a quarrel in which the husband had in the end come out victorious. For some reason the whole strength of his being had been put into the matter and one night as he stood in the common bedroom with his wife he had made a pronouncement so strong that he himself was surprised by the words that came from his lips. "If this woman goes out of this house without going voluntarily then I go also," he had said.