There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a downright rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six months' pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man.

As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One got bold after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend women were always to be had. He felt very resolute and strong.

V

When he had opened the door that led into the little room where he had been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door and with his hand on the doorknob, as though for support. Natalie's desk was beside a window at a corner of the room and beyond his own desk and through the window one could see into an empty space beside the spur of tracks that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been given the privilege of piling a reserve supply of lumber. The lumber was so piled that, in the soft evening light, the yellow boards made a kind of background for Natalie's figure.

The sun was shining on the lumber pile, the last soft rays of the evening sun. Above the lumber pile there was a space of clear light and into this Natalie's head was thrust.

An amazing thing had happened. When the fact of it came into his consciousness something within John Webster was torn open. What a simple thing Natalie had done and yet how significant. He stood with the doorknob grasped in his hand, clinging to the doorknob, and within himself the thing happened he had been trying to avoid. Tears came into his eyes. In all his after life he never lost the sense of that moment. In one instant all within himself was muddy and dirty with the thoughts he had been having about the proposed trip to Chicago and then the mud and dirt was all, as by a quick miracle, swept away.

"At any other time what Natalie had done might have passed unnoticed," he told himself later, but that fact did not in any way destroy its significance. All of the women who worked in his office as well as the book-keeper and the men in the factory were in the habit of carrying their lunches and Natalie had brought her lunch on that morning as always. He remembered to have seen her come in with it wrapped in a paper package.

Her home was a long distance away, at the edge of the town. None of the other of his employees came from so great a distance.