"You'll hear it said. Well, you'll read it in books and stories people write about death. 'At the moment of death he looked back and saw all his life spread out before him.'

"Ha! That's all right, but what about life? What about the moment when, having been dead, one comes back into life?"

John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his ai from about his daughter's shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight shivering sensation ran through his body and through body of his daughter. She did not understand what he was saying but in a queer sense that did not matter. They were at the moment deeply in accord. This having one's whole being suddenly become alive, after years of a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had to get a kind of new balance to the body and mind. One felt very young and strong and then suddenly old and tired. Now one was carrying his life forward as one might carry a filled cup through a crowded street. All the time one had to remember, to keep in mind, that there must be a certain relaxation to the body. One must give and swing with things a little. That must always be borne in mind. If one became rigid and intense at any time, except at the moment when one cast one's body into the body of his beloved, one's foot stumbled or one knocked against things and the filled cup one carried was emptied with an awkward gesture.

Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he sat there on the bed trying to get himself in hand. One might so very easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere about, one of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking everywhere in towns and cities and on farms, "one of the kind of people whose life is an empty cup," he thought and then a more majestic thought came and steadied him. There was something he had heard or read about sometime. What was it? "Arouse not up or awaken my love 'til he please," a voice within him said.

*

Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.

"We went off on our wedding trip to a farm-house in Kentucky, went there in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking about going slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I'd better go slow so that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into the one above. We were going on a visit to a farm owned by her uncle, by her father's brother, and we got to the town, where we were to get off the train, before breakfast in the morning.

"Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we drove off at once to this place in the country where we were to visit."