In a few minutes they came out, closing a door behind them, and walked also along the spur of track. Unlike the workers from the factory they knew the two people were still in the inner office and were curious. One of the three women came boldly up to the window and looked in. She went back to the others and they stood for a few minutes, making a small intense group in the half darkness. Then they went slowly away. When the group broke up, on the embankment above the river, the bookkeeper, a man of thirty-five, and the oldest of the three women went to the right along the tracks while the other two went to the left. The bookkeeper and the woman he walked with did not speak of what had been seen. They walked for several hundred yards together and then parted, turning from the tracks into separate streets. When the bookkeeper was alone he began to worry about the future. “You’ll see. Within a few months I’ll have to be looking for a new place. When that sort of thing begins business goes to pieces.” He was worried about the fact that, as he had a wife and two children and did not get a very large salary, he had no money saved. “Damn that Natalie Swartz. I’ll bet she’s a whore, that’s what I’ll bet,” he muttered as he went along. As for the two remaining women, one of them wanted to speak of the two people kneeling together in the dark office while the other did not. There were several ineffectual attempts at talk of the matter on the part of the older of the two and then they also parted. The youngest of the three, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning when he had just come out of Natalie’s presence and when he had for the first time realized that the doors of her being were open to him, went along the street past the door of the bookseller’s shop and up a climbing street into the lighted business section of the town. She kept smiling as she went along and it was because of something she herself did not understand. It was because she was herself one in whom the little voices talked and now they were going busily. Some phrase, picked up somewhere, from the Bible perhaps when she was a young girl and went to Sunday school, or from some book, kept saying itself over and over in her mind. What a charming combination of plain words in everyday use among people. She kept saying them in her mind and after a time, when she came to a place in the street where there was no one near, she said them aloud. “And as it turned out there was a marriage in our house,” were the words she said. BOOK TWO I