The poet Dante, Milton with his Paradise Lost, the Hebrew poets of the older Testaments, all such fellows must at some time in their lives have seen what he was seeing at just this moment.

There was a woman on the floor before him and her eyes were looking directly into his. All evening there had been something struggling within her, something that wanted to come out to him and to her daughter. Now the struggle was at an end. There was surrender. He kept looking down at her with a strange fixed stare in his own eyes.

"It's too late. It didn't work," he said slowly. He did not say the words aloud, but whispered them.

A new thought came. All through his life with this woman there had been a notion to which he had clung. It had been a kind of beacon that now he felt had from the first led him into a false trail. He had in some way picked up the notion from others about him. It was peculiarly an American notion, always being indirectly repeated in newspapers, magazines, and books. Back of it was an insane, wishy-washy philosophy of life. "All things work together for good. God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world. All men are created free and equal."

"What an ungodly lot of noisy meaningless sayings drummed into the ears of men and women trying to live their lives!"

A great disgust swept over him. "Well, there's no use my staying here any longer. My life in this house has come to its end," he thought.

He walked to the door and when he had opened it turned again. "Good night and good-bye," he said as cheerfully as though he were just leaving the house in the morning for a day at the factory.

And then the sound of the door closing made a sharp jarring break in the silence of the house.

The End