It seemed an anticlimax to my strung imagination, and I could have laughed aloud, but something in my father's attitude of stealthy watchfulness held my lips dumb, though I was on the point of pushing back through the wall to say, "How stupid, daddy!" as though a splendid game had been spoilt. For the woman was just an ordinary beggar, very dirty, very ragged, very weary and miserable, and so weak that she must have fallen, and now could only crawl to the comforting welcome of the fire; it was her body I had felt shake the hut as she had collapsed. And yet my father's face didn't change, but his fingers played foolishly together about his throat. He was usually so kind to the friendless and helpless that I expected to see him rise and help her in; and I began to think that I too should like his permission to return to my warm place out of the biting night air that chilled my hands and feet. But his face still wore its imbecile expression, and as the woman crept up to him he shrank away from her towards my side of the fire, chattering incomprehensibly, and watching her slyly out of the corner of his eyes. His strange manner must have startled her, for she made a circuit to avoid him, but with eyes fixed steadily upon him still moved slowly towards the fire, till soon they were both crouched one on either side of it, crossing glances through the flames. My father was seated with his back to me, but with his face half averted from the woman so that I could see it in profile; but the woman I had in full view. She was moaning weakly like a dumb creature in pain, and her hands were spread out tremblingly to the fire, as though greedy for its warmth. Her fingers were yellow and thin and withered. She was wearing a kind of bonnet from under which stray wisps of ragged hair straggled down over her face. The bones in her cheeks showed sharply, throwing deep shadows into the hollows behind, and her eyes beneath her great brows were like pits of blackness, occasionally gleaming with points of red as the firelight caught her pupils. And all the time as she warmed herself, trembling and complaining in broken whimpers, she watched my father, who for his part was edging farther and farther from her, jabbering stupidly and gurgling with low, throaty laughter. And so there they sat like animals in a cage, and although I had never seen anything quite so harmless and commonplace as the forlorn waif who had just crawled into our shelter, yet it seemed to me that the two as they fronted each other were like beasts preparing for a spring, and the woman's whine and my father's idiot cacklings were like the growls of coming battle.