He had put on his collar and coat, arranging everything quite calmly. Also he had packed a small bag, putting in extra shirts, pajamas, toilet articles, et cetera.

During all this time his daughter sat at the foot of the bed with her face buried in the crook of her arm that hung over the railing of the bed. Was she thinking? Were voices talking within her? What was she thinking?

In the interval, when the father's telling of the tale of his life in the house had ceased and while he was doing the necessary little mechanical things before setting out on his new way of life, there was this pregnant time of silence.

There was no doubt that, if he had become insane, the insanity within was becoming constantly more fixed, more a habit of his being. There was, taking constantly deeper and deeper roots within him, a new viewpoint of life or rather to be a bit fancy and speak of the matter more in the modern spirit, as he himself might later have done laughingly, one might say he had been permanently caught up and held by a new rhythm of life.

At any rate it is true that, long afterwards, when the man sometimes spoke of the experiences of that time, what he himself said was that one, by an effort of his own, and if he would but dare let himself go, could almost at will walk in and out of various planes of life. In speaking of such matters later he sometimes gave the impression that he quite calmly believed that one, once he had acquired the talent and courage for it, that one might even go so far as to be able to walk in the air along a street at the level of the second story of houses and look in at the people going about their private affairs in the upper rooms, as a certain historic man of the East is said to have once walked on the surface of the waters of a sea. It was all a part of a notion he had got fixed in his head regarding the tearing down of walls and the taking of people out of prisons.

There he was, at any rate, in his room fixing, let us say, his tie pin in his neck tie. He had got out the small bag into which he put as he thought of them the things he might need. In the next room his wife, the woman who in the process of living her life had become the large heavy inert one, was lying in silence on her bed as she had but a short while before been lying on the bed in the presence of himself and his daughter.

What dark and terrible things were in her mind? Or was her mind a blank as John Webster sometimes thought it had become?

At his back, in the same room with himself, was his daughter, in her thin night-gown and with her hair fallen down about her face and shoulders. Her body he could see the reflection of it in the glass as he arranged the tie was drooped and limp. The experiences of the evening had no doubt taken something out of her body, perhaps permanently. He wondered about that and his eyes in roving about the room found again the Virgin with the candles burning by her side looking calmly at the scene. It was that calmness men worshipped in the Virgin perhaps. It was a strange turn of events that had led him to bring her, the calm one, into the room, to make her a part of the whole remarkable affair. No doubt it was the calm virginal thing he was at that moment in the process of taking out of his daughter, it was the coming of that element out of her body that had left her so limp and apparently lifeless. There was no doubt he had been daring. The hand that was arranging the tie trembled a little.