“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 in 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 were 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. 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 an 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. BOOK FOUR I