Thus Vergie Winters and John Shadwell passed into middle age, and there came a time when he no longer sought election but instead became a power behind the throne, a man who shaped the careers of other men. He held power in the palm of his hand and no longer depended on votes. He grew careless, and one night he was seen by a Negro stable boy turning his key in the back door of Vergie Winters’s house. After that there were women who crossed the street in order to avoid passing the window with the gay bonnets; and children, hearing their parents whisper as they drove by on a summer evening, came to understand dimly that some evil monster lay hidden behind the neat fringed curtains. Once, while John Shadwell was away in Washington, boys stoned the house and broke all the windows; but Vergie Winters said nothing. In the morning a Slovak glazier, who was new to the Town and had never heard of its Scarlet Woman, came and repaired the damage; and after he had gone she was seen coming down the narrow steps, in that terrible pool of solitude, as if nothing at all had happened. So far as any one knew, she never spoke of the affair to John Shadwell. She wanted to save him, it seemed, even from such petty annoyances. And then as the years passed she sometimes saw from her window--the only safe spot from which she might peep--the figure of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter, grown now into a girl of twenty. A thousand times she must have watched the girl, always in company with John Shadwell’s sister, a large, bony spinster, as the pair came out of the shop on the corner and crossed the street in order that a girl so young and innocent might not have to pass the house of Vergie Winters. Thus she sat in the narrow, dun-coloured house, working at the gay bonnets, on the afternoon that John Shadwell’s adopted daughter was married to a son of the Presbyterian elder who refused to sell Vergie Winters a spool of thread. Perhaps on that afternoon she had a visit from one of the ladies of the street, who sat talking to her (she was such a lady) while the girl in her bridal dress walked down the aisle of the brick Presbyterian church--with no mother sitting in the pew on the right because John Shadwell’s wife had been too much upset by the preparations for the wedding. And one is certain that on the same night, when the festivities were ended, the figure of a middle-aged man followed the shadows of the alley behind Vergie Winters’s house, and let himself in with a key he had carried for more than twenty years. And one can hear him telling Vergie Winters who was at the wedding, and that there never was a prettier bride, and what music they played, and what there was at the wedding breakfast; and assuring her, as he touched her hand gently, that the bit of lace she had given him had been used in the bridal dress. He had told them he bought it himself.