As for his daughter, the thing to be done was to startle her, if possible, into a realization of the fact of life. "I owe her that," he thought. "Even though the thing that must happen will be terribly hard for her mother it may bring life to Jane. In the end the dead must surrender their places in life to the living. When long ago, I went to bed of that woman, who is my Jane's mother, I took a certain responsibility upon myself. The going to bed of her may not have been the most lovely thing in the world, as it turned out, but it is a thing that was done and the result is this child, who is now no longer a child, but who has become in her physical life a woman. Having helped to give her this physical life I have now to try at least to give her this other, this inner life also."

He looked down across the fields towards the town. When the job he had yet to do was done he would go away and spend the rest of his life moving about among people, looking at people, thinking of them and their lives. Perhaps he would become a writer. That would be as it turned out.

He got up from his seat on the grass at the top of the hill and went down along a road that would lead back to town and to his evening's walk with Natalie. Evening would be coming on soon now. "I'll never preach at any one, anyhow. If by chance I do ever become a writer I'll only try to tell people what I have seen and heard in life and besides that I'll spend my time walking up and down and looking and listening," he thought.

Book Three

I

And on that very night, after he had been seated on the hill thinking of his life and what he would do with what remained of it and after he had gone for the customary evening walk with Natalie, the doors of his room did open and his wife and daughter came in.

It was about half past eleven o'clock and for an hour he had been walking softly up and down before the picture of the Virgin. The candles were lighted. His feet made a soft cat-like sound on the floor. There was something strange and startling about hearing the sound in the quiet house.

The door leading to his wife's room opened and she stood looking at him. Her tall form filled the door-way and her hands clutched at the sides of the door. She was very pale and her eyes were fixed and staring. "John," she said hoarsely and then repeated the word. She seemed to want to say more, but to be unable to speak. There was a sharp sense of ineffectual struggle.

It was certain she was not very handsome as she stood there. "Life pays people out. Turn your back on life and it gets even with you. When people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead," he thought. He smiled at her and then turned his head away and stood listening.