It was the third night I was there that the thing happened. I was getting along fine. I did the ordering and the managing and took part care of the baby and mended up clothes and did the dozens of things that Ellen wasn't strong enough to do. Delia and I had got to be real good friends by the second day. Russell came home that third night looking fagged out. He was never nervous or impatient--I noticed that about him. I'd never once seen him take it out in his conversation with his wife merely because he had had a hard day. We'd just gone in from the dining-room when Russell, instead of lighting his pipe and taking his paper, turned round on the rug, and says: "Dear, I think I'll go over to Beldon's a while to-night." She was crossing the floor, and I remember how she turned and looked at him. "Beldon's?" she said. "Have--have you some business?" "No," Russell says. "He wanted me to come in and have a game of billiards." "Very well," she says only, and she went and sat down by the fire. He got into his coat, humming a little under his breath, and then he came over and stooped down and kissed her. She kissed him, but she hardly turned her head. And she didn't turn her head at all as he went out. When he'd gone and she heard the apartment door shut, Ellen fairly frightened me. She sank down in the big chair where I had first seen her, and put her head on its arm, and cried--cried till her little shoulders shook, and I could hear her sobs. "Ellen," I says, "what is it?" Though, mind you, I knew well enough. She put her arms round my neck as I kneeled down beside her. "Oh, Calliope, Calliope!" she says. "It's the end of things." "End," says I, "of what?" She looked in my face, with the tears streaming down hers. "Didn't you realize," she says, "that that is the first time my husband ever has left me in the evening--when he didn't have to?" I saw that I had to be as wise as ten folks and as harmless as none, if I was to help her--and help him. And all at once I felt as if I _was_ ten folks, and as if I'd got to live up to them all. Because I didn't underestimate the minute. No woman can underestimate that minute when it comes to any other woman. For out of it there are likely to come down onto her the issues of either life or death; and the worst of it is that, ten to one, she never once sees that it's in her power, maybe, to say whether it shall be life or death that comes. "What of it?" I says, as calm as if I didn't see anything at all, instead of seeing more than she saw, as I know I did. She stared at me. "Don't you understand," she says, "what it means?" "Why, it means," says I, "that he wants a game of billiards, the way any other man does, once in a while." She shook her head, mournful.