His silence seemed to have aroused his wife, who turned and looked at him. Then she sat up on the bed and he sprang to his feet and stood confronting her. "John," she said again in a hoarse whisper as though wishing to call him back to her out of some dark mysterious place. Her mouth opened and closed two or three times like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water. He looked away and paid no more attention to her and she again put her face down among the bed-clothes.

"What I wanted, long ago, when Jane was a tiny thing, was simply that life come into her and that is what I want now. That's all I do want. That's what I'm after now," John Webster thought.

He began walking up and down the room again, having a sense of great leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife had again fallen into the ocean of silence. She would lie there on the bed and say nothing, do nothing until he had finished saying what he had to say and had gone away. His daughter was blind and dumb with fear now, but perhaps he could warm the fear out of her. "I must go about this matter slowly, take my time, tell her everything," he thought. The frightened girl now took her hand from before her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth trembled and then a word was formed. "Father," she said appealingly.

He smiled at her reassuringly and made a movement with his arm towards the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. "Look up there for a moment while I talk to you," he said.

He plunged at once into an explanation of his situation.

"There has been something broken," he said. "It is the habit of life in this house. Now you will not understand, but sometime you will.

"For years I have not been in love with this woman here, who is your mother and has been my wife, and now I have fallen into love with another woman. Her name is Natalie and to-night, after you and I have had our talk, she and I are going away to live together."

On an impulse he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter's feet and then quickly sprang up again. "No, that's not right. I am not to ask her forgiveness, I am to tell her of things," he thought.

"Well now," he began again, "you are going to think me insane and perhaps I am. I don't know. Anyway my being here in this room with the Virgin and without any clothes, the strangeness of all this will make you think me insane. Your mind will cling to that thought. It will want to cling to that thought," he said aloud. "It may turn out so for a time."

He seemed puzzled as to how to say all the things he wanted to say. The whole matter, the scene in the room, the talk with his daughter that he had planned so carefully was going to be a harder matter to handle than he had thought. He had thought there would be a kind of final significance in his nakedness and in the presence of the Virgin and her candles. Had he overset the stage? he wondered, and kept looking with eyes filled with anxiety at his daughter's face. It told him nothing. She was just frightened and clinging to the railing at the foot of the bed as one cast suddenly into the sea might cling to a floating piece of wood. His wife's body lying on the bed had a strange rigid look. Well there had for years been something rigid and cold in the woman's body. Perhaps she had died. That would be a thing to have happen. It would be something he had not counted upon. It was rather strange, now that he came to face the problem before him, how very little the presence of his wife had to do with the matter in hand.