The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from the rooms like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms had been occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on the floor and a pair of half-burned trousers flung over the back of a chair, while in the second room, evidently occupied by a woman, there were no signs of male attire. The place had made John Webster think of his own married life. “It is as it might have been with us had my wife and I not quit sleeping together. That might have been our room with the room of our daughter Jane beside it,” he had thought on the morning after the fire as he walked past and stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at the scene above. And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town his imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the houses and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his imagination could so flame up, running along whole streets of houses and wiping out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the trees, was a new and living wonder to himself. “A life-giving thing has been given to me. For many years I have been dead and now I am alive,” he thought. To give the fuller play to his fancy he got off the sidewalk and walked in the centre of the street. The houses lay before him all silent and the late moon had appeared and made black pools under the trees. The houses stripped of their walls were on either side of him. In the houses the people were sleeping in their beds. How many bodies lying and sleeping close together, babes asleep in cribs, young boys sleeping sometimes two or three in a single bed, young women asleep with their hair fallen down about their faces. As they slept they dreamed. Of what did they dream? He had a great desire that what had happened to himself and Natalie should happen to all of them. The love-making in the field had after all been but a symbol of something more filled with meaning than the mere act of two bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life from one body to another.