There was a woman in the rich man’s house—his guilty wife. She was slender and willowy. Ah, there was something serpentine about her. In Maud’s imagination she lay on a silken couch beside the table, at which the man now sat down to eat his breakfast. A wood fire burned in the fireplace. The woman’s hand stole forward and a tiny pinch of the white powder went into the coffee cup; then she raised a white hand and stroked the man’s cheek. She closed her eyes and lay back on the silken couch. The dastardly deed was done and the woman did not care. She was not even curious as to how death would come. She yawned and waited. The man drank his coffee and arising moved about the room and then a sudden pallor came upon his cheeks. It was quite noticeable as he was a ruddy-cheeked man with soft grey hair—a strong commanding figure of a man, a leader among men. Maud pictured him as the president of a great railroad system. She had never seen a railroad president but her father had often spoken of the president of the Nickle Plate and had described him as a big fine looking fellow. What a thing is passion, so terrible, so strange. It takes such unimaginable turns. The woman on the silken couch, the willowy serpentine woman, had turned from her husband, from the commander of men, from the strong man, the powerful one who swept all before him, and had given her illicit but powerfully fascinating love to a railroad mail clerk. Maud had seen Jerome Hadley. When the Wellivers had first come to Bidwell she, with her aunt and father, had been driven about town with a real-estate man and his wife. They were looking for a house in which to live and as they drove about the real-estate man’s wife, who sat on the back seat of a surrey with Maud and her aunt, had pointed to Jerome Hadley, walking past in the street, and had told in a whisper the story of his going into the wood with May Edgley. Maud was half sick on that day and had not listened. The railroad journey from Fort Wayne to Bidwell had given her a headache. However, she had looked at Jerome. He had sloping shoulders, pale grey eyes and sandy hair, and when he walked he toed out badly and his trousers were baggy. And for that man the woman on the silken couch, the railroad president’s wife, was ready to commit murder. What an unexplainable, what a strange thing is love! The windings and twistings of its pathway through life cannot be followed by the human mind.