Doubt came. As I have said the house was at that moment very silent. In the next room his wife, lying on the bed, made no sound. She floated in a sea of silence, as she had done ever since that other night, long before, when shame, in the form of a naked and distraught man, had embraced her nakedness in the presence of those others.

Had he in turn done the same thing to his daughter? Had he plunged her also into that sea"? It was a startling and terrible thought. One did no doubt upset things by becoming insane in a sane world or sane in an insane world. Quite suddenly everything became upset, turned quite upside down.

*

And then it might well be true that the whole matter simply resolved itself into this that he, John Webster, was merely a man who had become suddenly enamoured of his stenographer and wanted to go and live with her and that he had found himself without the courage to do so simple a thing without making a fuss about it, without in fact an elaborate justification of himself, at the expense of these others. To justify himself he had devised this strange business of appearing nude before the young girl who was his daughter and who in reality, being his daughter, deserved the utmost consideration from him. There was no doubt but that, from one point of view, what he had done was altogether unforgivable. "After all I am still but a washing machine manufacturer in a small Wisconsin town," he told himself, whispering the words out slowly and distinctly to himself.

That was a thing to bear in mind. Now his bag was packed and he was quite dressed and ready to set out. When the mind no longer moved forward sometimes the body took its place and made the consummation of an act once begun quite definitely unavoidable.

He walked across the room and stood for a time looking up into the calm eyes of the Virgin in the frame.

His thoughts were again like bells heard ringing across fields. "I am in a room in a house on a street in a town in the state of Wisconsin. At this moment most of the other people here in town, the people among whom I have always lived are in bed and asleep, but to-morrow morning when I am gone the town will be here and will move forward with its life, as it has been doing since I was a young fellow, married a woman, and began living my present life." There were these definite facts of existence. One wore clothes, ate, moved about among his fellow men and women. Certain phases of life were lived in the darkness of nights, others in the light of days. In the morning the three women who worked at his office and also the book-keeper would appear to do their usual tasks. When, after a time, neither he nor Natalie Swartz appeared there would begin a looking from one to another. After a time whispering would begin. There would begin a whispering that would run through the town, visit all the houses, the shops, the stores. Men and women would stop on the street to speak to each other, the men speaking to other men, the women to other women. The women who were wives would be a little angry at him and the men a little envious, but the men would perhaps speak of him more bitterly than the women. That would be to cover up their own wish to break in some way the boredom of their own existence.