"We were running about the house naked as I am doing here now. What happened was that I came naked out of that shed down stairs and climbed the stairs to the upper part of the house, going to my room. The day had grown warm and now it was almost dark."

Again John Webster came to sit with his daughter on the bed am to hold one of her hands.

"I went up the stairs and along a hallway and opening a door went across a room to what I thought was my bed, where I had laid out the clothes I had brought that morning in my bag.

"You see what had happened was that your mother had got out of her bed in her own town at midnight on the night before and when she arrived at my friend's house his mother and sister had insisted she undress and get into bed. She had not unpacked her bag, but had thrown off her clothes and had got in between the sheets as naked as I was when I walked in upon her. As the day had turned warm she had I suppose grown somewhat restless and in stirring about had thrown the bed-clothes to one side.

"She lay, you see, quite nude on the bed, in the uncertain light, and as I had no shoes on my feet I made no sound when I came into her.

"It was an amazing moment for me. I had walked directly to the bed and there she was within a few inches of my hands as they hung by my side. It was your mother's most lovely moment with me. As I have said she was then very slender and her long body was white like the sheets of the bed. At that time I had never before been in the presence of a woman undressed. I had just come from the bath. It was like a kind of wedding, you see.

"How long I stood there looking at her I don't know, but anyway she knew I was there. Her eyes came up to me out of sleep like a swimmer out of the sea. Perhaps, it is just possible, she had been dreaming of me or of some other man.

"At any rate and for just a moment she was not frightened or startled at all. It was really our wedding moment, you see.

"O had we only known how to live up to that moment. I stood there looking at her and she was there on the bed looking at me. There must have been a glowing something alive in our eyes. I did not know then all I felt, but long afterward, sometimes, when I was walking in the country or riding on a train, I thought. Well, what did I think? It was evening you see. I mean that afterwards, sometimes, when I was alone, when it was evening and I was alone I looked off across hills or I saw a river making a white streak down below as I stood on a cliff. What I mean to say is that I have spent all these years trying to recapture that moment and now it is dead."