She dragged her eyes away from the picture; crossed the room; broke down completely, her head on his knees, her shuddering body crouched closely to the floor: "When you've--been frightened--and have to live with it--and it doesn't even stop at night--for weeks and months and years--one's nerves aren't quite reliable.... They've no right to call that murder, have they? have they, Dickie? When you've been afraid for a long time--and there's no one you can tell about it except the person who _makes_ the _fear_...." But Dickie was all that she had perilously dared to hope he would be at this crisis. He soothed her and healed her by his loyalty; promised, without her extorting it, that he would never tell a soul what she had just told him; pixie-shy, yet he spoke of his personal need of her--and more than anything else she had desired to hear this. He mentioned some trivial intimate plans for their unbroken, unchanged future together, so as to reassure her of its continuance. He even made her laugh. In fact, for a last appearance in the _role_ of a gallant little gentleman, Dickie did not do so badly. He woke in the night from a bad dream--with terror clinging thickly about his senses. But it did not slowly dissolve and release him, as nightmare is wont to do. It remained--so that he lay still as a man in his winding-sheet, afraid to move--remembering-- "I _did_ kill my husband." Yes--that was it. In the room with him was a strange woman who had killed her husband. Not Ruth--but a strange woman. How had she got into the room with him? She had killed her husband. And now, _he_ was her husband. He lay motionless, but his imagination began to crawl.... What might happen to a man shut up alone in a house with a woman who--murdered? His imagination began to race--and he lost control of it. Murder ... with dry, sandy throat and a kicking heart, Dickie had to pay for his audacity in imagining he was big enough to claim life in the raw. "Not big enough! Not big enough!"--the goblins of the underworld croaked at him in triumphant chorus.... They capered ... they snapped their fingers at him ... they spun him down to where fear was ... he had delivered himself to them, by not being big enough. "Mrs. Bigger had a baby--which was bigger, Mrs. Bigger or the baby?" The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void--and over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the answer, trying to forget fear.... "Mrs. Bigger had a baby--" He dared not fall asleep ... with the woman who had killed her husband, alone in the room with him ... alone in the house with him. A stir from the other bed, and one arm flung out in sleep. Dickie's knees jerked violently--his skin went cold and sticky with sweat. "You fool--it's only Ruth!" But she _did_ it--she did it once. There are people who can't kill, and a few, just a very few, who can. And because they can, they are different, and have to be shut away from the herd.