The streets lined with houses in which people lived were dark. It was past eleven o'clock, but there was no need to hurry home. When he got into bed he could not sleep. "It would be better just to walk about for an hour yet," he decided and when he came to the corner that led into his own street did not turn, but kept on, going far out to the edge of town and back. His feet made a sharp sound on the stone sidewalks. Sometimes he met a man homeward-bound and as they passed the man looked at him with surprise and something like distrust in his eyes. He walked past and then turned to look back. "What are you doing abroad? Why aren't you at home and in bed with your wife?" the man seemed to be asking.

What was the man really thinking? Was there much thinking going on in all the dark houses along the street or did people simply go into them to eat and sleep as he had always gone into his own house? In fancy he got a quick vision of many people lying in beds stuck high in the air. The walls of the houses had receded.

Once, during the year before, there had been a fire in a house on his own street and the walls of the house had fallen down. When the fire was put out one walked past in the street and there, laid bare to the public gaze, were two upstairs rooms in which people had lived for many years. Everything was a little burned and charred, but quite intact. In each room there was a bed, one or two chairs, a square piece of furniture with drawers in which shirts or dresses could be kept, and at the side of the room a closet for other clothes.

The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from the room like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms had been occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on the floor and a pair of half burned trousers flung over the back of a chair, while in the second room, evidently occupied by a woman, there were no signs of male attire. The place had made John Webster think of his own married life. "It is as it might have been with us had my wife and I not quit sleeping together. That might have been our room with the room of our daughter Jane beside it," he had thought on the morning after the fire as he walked past and stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at the scene above.

And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town his imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the houses and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his imagination could so flame up, running along whole streets of houses and wiping out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the trees, was a new and living wonder to himself. "A life-giving thing has been given to me. For many years I have been dead and now I am alive," he thought. To give the fuller play to his fancy he got off the sidewalk and walked in the centre of the street. The houses lay before him all silent and the late moon had appeared and made black pools under the trees.