Then later he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters. To be sure he did not write out the fancies he had been having. Oh, had he but had the courage to do that. Had he but known enough to do that.

What he did was to write the word "love," over and over rather stupidly. "I went walking and I thought of you and I loved you so. I saw a house I liked and I thought of you and me living in it as man and wife. I am sorry I was so stupid and blundering when I saw you that other time. Give me another chance and I will prove my 'love' to you."

What a betrayal! It was John Webster himself who had, in the end, poisoned the wells of truth at which he and the woman would have to drink as they went along the road towards happiness.

He hadn't been thinking of her at all. He had been thinking of the strange mysterious woman lying in the upper bed-chamber in the city of the land of his fancy.

Everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set straight again. One day a letter came from her and then, after writing a great many other letters, he went to her town to see her.

There was a time of embarrassment and then the past was apparently forgotten. They went to walk together under the trees in a strange town. Later he wrote more letters and came to see her again. One night he asked her to marry him.

The very devil! He didn't even take her into his arms when he asked her. There was a kind of fear involved in the whole matter. "I'd better not after what happened before. I'll wait until we're married. Things will be different then." One had a notion. It was that after marriage one became something quite different from what me had been before and that the beloved one also became something quite different.

And so he had managed to get married, having that notion ; and he and the woman had set out together upon a wedding trip.

*

John Webster held his daughter's body closely against his own and trembled a little. "I had some notion in my head that I had better go slow," he said. "You see, I had already frightened her once. 'We'll go slow here,' I kept saying to myself, 'well, she doesn't know much about life, I'd better go pretty slow.' '

The memory of the moment of his marriage stirred John Webster profoundly.

The bride was coming down a stairway. Strange people stood about. All the time, down inside the strange people, down inside all people everywhere, there was thinking going on of which no one seemed aware.

"Now you look at me, Jane. I'm your father. I was that way. All these years, while I've been your father, I've been just like that.

"Something happened to me. A lid was jerked off something somewhere in me. Now, you see, I stand, as though on a high hill and look down into a valley where all my former life has been lived. Quite suddenly, you understand, I know all the thoughts I've been having all of my life.