" I had come to the house bare-headed, you understand, and no doubt looking a little wild. Perhaps everyone in that house thought I had gone suddenly out of my mind and it may be that in fact I had.

"At any rate I felt very calm and on that evening and for all these years, up to a short time ago, when I became in love with Natalie, I've always been a very calm man, or at least thought I was. I have dramatized myself that way. What I suppose is that death is always a very calm thing and I must, in a way, have been committing suicide on that evening.

"There had been, in the town, a few weeks before this happened, a scandal that had got into the courts and was written about guardedly in our weekly newspaper. It concerned a case of rape. A farmer, who had employed in his household a young girl, had sent his wife off to town to buy supplies and while she was gone had got the girl into the upper part of his house and had raped her, tearing her clothes off and even beating her before he forced her to acquiesce in his desires. Later he had been arrested and brought to town where, at the very time I was kneeling on the floor before the body of my future wife, he was in jail.

"I speak of the matter because, as I knelt there, I remember now, a thought crossed my mind connecting me with the man. I am also committing a rape' something within me said.

"To the woman, who was there before me, so cold and white, I said something else.

" 'You understand that, this evening, when I first came to you naked, it was an accident,' I said. 'I want you to understand that, but I want you also to understand that when I came to you the second time it was not an accident. I want you to understand everything quite fully and then I want to ask you to marry me, to consent to be my wife.'

"That was what I said and after I had said it I took one of her hands in mine and, without looking at her, knelt there at her feet waiting for her to speak. Perhaps had she spoken then, even in condemnation of me, everything would have been all right.

"She said nothing. I understand now why she couldn't, but then I didn't understand. I have always, I admit, been impatient. Time passed and I waited. I was like one who has fallen from a great height into the sea and who feels himself going down and down, deeper and deeper. There is a great weight, you understand, pressing upon the man in the sea and he cannot breathe. What I suppose is that in the case of a man, falling thus into the sea, the force of his fall does after a time expend itself and he comes to a stop in his descent, and then suddenly begins again rising to the surface of the sea.