"The truth is I have wanted to startle you and I guess I have succeeded in that."

He walked across the room and sat on the bed between his daughter and the heavy inert body of his wife. They were both dressed in night-gowns and his daughter's hair had fallen down about her shoulders. It was like his wife's hair when he had married her. Then her hair had been just such a golden yellow and when the sun shone on it coppery and brown lights sometimes appeared.

"I'm going away from this house to-night. I'm not going to live with your mother any more," he said, leaning forward and looking at the floor.

He straightened his body and for a long time sat looking at his daughter's body. It was young and slender. She would not be extraordinarily tall like her mother, but would be a woman of the medium height. He studied her body carefully. Once, when she was a child of six, Jane had been ill for nearly a year and he remembered now that during that time she had been very precious to him. It was during a year when the business had gone badly and he thought he might have to go into bankruptcy at any moment, but he had managed to keep a trained nurse in the house during the whole period of her illness. Every day during that time he came home from the factory at noon and went into his daughter's room.

There was no fever. What was wrong? He had thrown the bedclothes off the child's body and had looked at it. She was very thin then and the little bones of the body could be plainly seen. There was just the tiny bony structure over which the fair white skin was drawn.

The doctors had said it was a matter of malnutrition, that the food given the child did not nourish it, and they could not find the right food. The mother had been unable to nurse the child. Sometimes during that period he stood for long minutes looking at the child whose tired listless eyes looked back at him. The tears ran from his own eyes.

It was very strange. Since that time and after she had suddenly begun to grow well and strong again he had in some way lost all track of his daughter. Where had he been in the meantime and where had she been? They were two people and they had been living in the same house all these years. What was it that shut people off from each other? He looked carefully at his daughter's body, now clearly outlined under the thin night-gown. She had rather slender hips, like a boy's hips, but her shoulders were broad. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. "I am a stranger to her and it is not surprising," he thought. He leaned forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well made. Perhaps sometime a lover would come to kiss them. Sometime a man would feel concerning her body as he now felt concerning the strong hard body of Natalie Swartz.