He stopped his rush along the tracks and leaned over to pick it up. It was something, perhaps a jewel of some sort, perhaps just a cheap little plaything some child had lost. The stone was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green. When the rays of the sun fell on it, as he held it in his hand, the color changed. After all it might be a valuable thing. “Perhaps some woman, riding on a train through the town, has lost it out of her ring or out of a brooch she wears at her throat,” he thought and had a momentary picture floating in his mind. In the picture there was a tall strong fair woman, standing, not on a train but on a hill above a river. The river was wide and as it was winter was covered with ice. The woman had one hand raised and was pointing. A ring was on her finger and the small green stone was set in the ring. He could see everything very minutely. The woman stood on the hill and the sun shone on her and the stone in the ring was now pale, now dark like the waters of a sea, and beside the woman stood a man, a rather heavy-looking man with gray hair, with whom the woman was in love. The woman was saying something to the man about the stone set in the ring and John Webster could hear the words very distinctly. What strange words she was saying. “My father gave it to me and told me to wear it for all my loves. He called it, ‘the jewel of life,’” she said. Hearing the rumble of a train, far away somewhere in the distance, John Webster got off the tracks. There was at just that place a high embankment beside the river along which he could walk. “I don’t intend to come near being killed by a train as I was this morning when that young negro saved me,” he thought. He looked away to the west and to the evening sun and then down at the bed of the river. Now the river was low and only a narrow channel of water ran through wide banks of caked mud. He put the little green stone in his vest pocket. “I know what I am going to do,” he told himself resolutely. Quickly a plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office and hurry through any letters that had come in. Then, without looking at Natalie Swartz, he would get up and go away. There was a train for Chicago at eight o’clock and he would tell his wife he had business in the city and would take the train. What a man had to do in life was to face facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman. When it came right down to the truth he would go on a regular bat. He would find himself a woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like doing it would stay drunk for several days.