There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a down-right rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six months’ pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man. As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One got bold after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend women were always to be had. It was too bad that it was so but the truth was that the need of women was a part of a man’s makeup and the fact might as well be faced. “When you come down to that, I am a business man and it is a business man’s place in the scheme of things to face facts,” he decided and suddenly he felt very resolute and strong. As for Natalie, to tell the truth, there was in her perhaps something that it was a little hard for him to resist. “If there were only my wife it would be different but there is my daughter Jane. She is a pure young innocent thing and must be protected. I can’t let her in for a mess,” he told himself as he walked boldly along the little spur of the tracks that led to the door of his factory. V When he had opened the door that led into the little room where he had been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door and with his hand on the door-knob, as though for support. Natalie’s desk was beside a window at a corner of the room and beyond his own desk and through the window one could see into an empty space beside the spur of tracks that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been given the privilege of piling a reserve supply of lumber. The lumber was so piled that, in the soft evening light, the yellow boards made a kind of background for Natalie’s figure. The sun was shining on the lumber pile, the last soft rays of the evening sun. Above the lumber pile there was a space of clear light and into this Natalie’s head was thrust. An amazing and lovely thing had happened. When the fact of it came into his consciousness something within John Webster was torn open. What a simple thing Natalie had done and yet how significant. He stood with the door-knob grasped in his hand, clinging to the door-knob, and within himself the thing happened he had been trying to avoid. Tears came into his eyes. In all his after life he never lost the sense of that moment. In one instant all within himself was muddy and dirty with the thoughts he had been having about the proposed trip to Chicago and then the mud and dirt was all, as by a quick miracle, swept away.