At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and free--did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened. There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers began to creep down along her legs. Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she had been but a few hours earlier. * * * * * How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere, off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road and the rattle of a wagon. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a long way to go that he started out so early. She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid? She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment, let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house. “Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the house? Had something happened to her mother? There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind. The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.