Then, slowly, the town came to accept the state of affairs as a permanent scandal. One seldom spoke of it any longer. One simply knew that Vergie Winters and John Shadwell had been living together for years. He was rich, he was important, he was a power in politics; and now that his career no longer mattered, he had grown indifferent and a little defiant. So far as John Shadwell was concerned, he was a leading citizen nearly seventy years old, the grandfather of children by his adopted daughter. But with Vergie Winters? She still went her solitary way, making her few bonnets, now a little old-fashioned and _démodé_ for all her sedulous reading of the fashion papers. (One can see her, slightly grayed, putting on her spectacles and peering closely at the pages.) And still, as she sat behind the lace curtains at her window, she saw the figure of John Shadwell’s daughter, remote and upright and a little buxom, crossing the street and going down the opposite side; only instead of being led by John Shadwell’s spinster sister she was leading her own children now. And night after night the figure of John Shadwell, no longer an ardent lover but an old man, following the shadows of the alley (less and less furtively as he grew older) to turn the worn key in the lock and sit there all through the evening with Vergie Winters. What did they do? What did they say to each other in those long winter evenings? And at last, one night, John Shadwell’s wife, peevish and fretful in her tight-closed bedroom smelling of medicines, sent for him at midnight to read to her, only to be told that he had not come in. Again at two o’clock, and again at three--still he had not come in. Even when the gray light filtered through the elms on to the iron dogs and deer, he had not come back. They knew then that he would never return; for he lay dead in Vergie Winters’s narrow, dun-coloured house, behind the lace curtains and the gay bonnets. He had belonged to her always, and in that silent, powerful way of hers she had known it from the beginning. In the end he came to Vergie Winters to die....