"It may just be, you see, that there is something of the poet in me and Natalie should have a poet for a lover.

"The truth is that I shall be at the job of in some way bringing grace and meaning into my life. It must be after all that it is for something of the sort life is intended.

"In reality it would not be such a bad thing if, in the few years of life I have left, I accomplished nothing of importance. When one comes right down to it accomplishment is not the vital thing in a life.

"As things are now, here in this town and in all the other towns and cities I have ever been in, things are a good deal in a muddle. Everywhere lives are lived without purpose. Men and women either spend their lives going in and out of the doors of houses and factories or they own houses and factories and they live their lives and find themselves at last facing death and the end of life without having lived at all."

He kept smiling at himself and his own thoughts as he walked up and down the room and occasionally he stopped walking and made an elaborate bow to the Virgin. "I hope you are a true virgin," he said. "I brought you into this room and into the presence of my nude body because I thought you would be that. You see, being a virgin, you cannot have anything but pure thoughts."

IV

Quite often, during the day-time, and after the time when the nightly ceremony in his room began, John Webster had moments of fright. "Suppose," he thought, "my wife and daughter should look through the keyhole into my room some night, and should decide to have me locked up instead of coming in there and giving me the chance I want to talk with them. As the matter stands I cannot carry out my plans unless I can get the two of them into the room without asking them to come."

He had a keen sense of the fact that what was to transpire in his room would be terrible for his wife. Perhaps she would not be able to stand it. A streak of cruelty had developed in him. In the daytime now he seldom went to his office and when he did stayed but a few minutes. Every day he took a long walk into the country, sat under the trees, wandered in woodland paths and in the evening walked in silence beside Natalie, also in the country. The days marched past in quiet fall splendour. There was a kind of sweet new responsibility in just being alive when one felt so alive.

One day he climbed a little hill from the top of which he could see, off across fields, the factory chimneys of his town. A soft haze lay over woodland and fields. The voices within him did not riot (_ now, but chattered softly.