It was very strange. Since that time and after she had suddenly begun to grow well and strong again he had in some way lost all track of his daughter. Where had he been in the meantime and where had she been? They were two people and they had been living in the same house all these years. What was it that shut people off from each other? He looked carefully at his daughter’s body, now clearly outlined under the thin nightgown. She had rather broad hips, like a woman’s hips, and her shoulders were narrow. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. “I am a stranger to her and it is not surprising,” he thought. He leaned forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well made. Sometime a lover would come to kiss them. Sometime a man would feel concerning her body as he now felt concerning the strong hard body of Natalie Swartz. His silence seemed to have aroused his wife, who turned and looked at him. Then she sat up on the bed and he sprang to his feet and stood confronting her. “John,” she said again in a hoarse whisper as though wishing to call him back to her out of some dark mysterious place. Her mouth opened and closed two or three times like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water. He looked away and paid no more attention to her and she again put her face down among the bedclothes. “What I wanted, long ago, when Jane was a tiny thing, was simply that life come into her and that is what I want now. That’s all I do want. That’s what I’m after now,” John Webster thought. He began walking up and down the room again, having a sense of great leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife had again fallen into the ocean of silence. She would lie there on the bed and say nothing, do nothing until he had finished saying what he had to say and had gone away. His daughter was blind and dumb with fear now, but perhaps he could warm the fear out of her. “I must go about this matter slowly, take my time, tell her everything,” he thought. The frightened girl now took her hand from before her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth trembled and then a word was formed. “Father,” she said appealingly. He smiled at her reassuringly and made a movement with his arm toward the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. “Look up there for a moment while I talk to you,” he said. He plunged at once into an explanation of his situation. “There has been something broken,” he said. “It is the habit of life in this house. Now you will not understand, but sometime you will. “For years I have not been in love with this woman here, who is your mother and has been my wife, and now I have fallen in love with another woman. Her name is Natalie and to-night, after you and I have had our talk, she and I are going away to live together.” On an impulse he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter’s feet and then quickly sprang up again. “No, that’s not right. I am not to ask her forgiveness, I am to tell her of things,” he thought.