The door leading to his wife’s room opened and she stood looking at him. Her tall form filled the doorway and her hands clutched at the sides of the door. She was very pale and her eyes were fixed and staring. “John,” she said hoarsely and then repeated the word. She seemed to want to say more, but to be unable to speak. There was a sharp sense of ineffectual struggle. It was certain she was not very handsome as she stood there. “Life pays people out. Turn your back on life and it gets even with you. When people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead,” he thought. He smiled at her and then turned his head away and stood listening. It came--the sound for which he was listening. There was a stir in his daughter’s room. He had counted so much on things turning out as he wished and had even had a premonition it would happen on this particular night. What had happened he thought he understood. For more than a week now there had been this storm raging over the ocean of silence that was his wife. There had been just such another prolonged and resentful silence after their first attempt at love-making and after he had said certain sharp hurtful things to her. That had gradually worn itself out, but this new thing was something different. It could not wear itself out in that way. The thing had happened for which he had prayed. She had been compelled to meet him here, in the place he had prepared. And now his daughter, who had also been lying awake night after night, and hearing the strange sounds in her father’s room, would be compelled to come. He felt almost gay. On that evening he had told Natalie that he thought his struggle might come to a breaking point that night and had asked her to be ready for him. There was a train that would leave town at four in the morning. “Perhaps we shall be able to take that,” he had said. “I’ll be waiting for you,” Natalie had said and now there was his wife, standing pale and trembling, as though about to fall and looking from the Virgin between her candles to his naked body and then there was the sound of some one moving in his daughter’s room. And now her door crept open an inch, softly, and he went at once and threw it completely open. “Come in,” he said. “Both of you come in. Go sit there on the bed together. I’ve something to say to you both.” There was a commanding ring in his voice. There was no doubt the women were both, for the moment at least, completely frightened and cowed. How pale they both were. The daughter put her hands to her face and ran across the room to sit upright holding to a railing at the foot of the bed and still holding one hand over her eyes and his wife walked across and fell face downward on the bed. She made a continuous little moaning sound for a time and then buried her face in the bedclothes and became silent. There was no doubt both women thought him completely insane.