When he had got into the hallway and had closed the door he set his bag down and came back. As he stood within the room, with the knob still held in his hand, he heard a noise on the floor below. "That's Katherine. What's she doing up at this time of the night?" he thought. He took out his watch and went nearer the burning candles. It was fifteen minutes to three. "We'll catch the early morning train at four all right," he thought.

There was his wife, or rather the woman who for so long a time had been his wife, on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now her eyes were looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say. They did not even plead with him. There was in them something that was hopelessly puzzled. If the events that had transpired in the room on that night had torn the lid off the well she carried about within herself she had managed to clamp it back on again. Now perhaps the lid would never again stir from its place. John Webster felt peculiarly as he fancied an undertaker might feel on being called at night into the presence of a dead body.

"The devil! Such fellows perhaps had no such feelings." Quite unconscious of what he was doing he took out a cigarette and lit it. He felt strangely impersonal; like one watching a rehearsal for some play in which one is not particularly interested. "It's a time of death all right," he thought. "The woman is dying. I can't say whether or not her body is dying, but there's something within her that has already died." He wondered if he had killed her, but had no sense of guilt in the matter.

He went to stand at the foot of the bed and, putting his hand on the railing, leaned over to look at her.

It was a time of darkness. A shiver ran through his body and dark thoughts like flocks of blackbirds flew across the field of his fancy.

"The devil! There's a hell too! There's such a thing as death, as well as such a thing as life," he told himself. Here was however an amazing and quite interesting fact too. It had taken a long time and much grim determination for the woman on the floor before him to find her way along the road to the throne-room of death. "Perhaps no one, while there is life within him to lift the lid, ever becomes quite submerged in the swamp of decaying flesh," he thought.

Thoughts stirred within John Webster that had not come to his mind for years. As a young man in college he must really have been more alive than he knew at the time. Things he had heard discussed by other young men, fellows who had a taste for literature, and that he had read in the books, the reading of which was a part of his duties, had all through the last few weeks been coming back to his mind. "One might almost think I had followed such things all my life," he thought.