the child whose tired listless eyes looked back at him. The tears ran from his own eyes.
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 night-gown. She had rather slender hips, like a boy's hips, but her shoulders were broad. 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. Perhaps 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 bed-clothes.
"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 arm towards the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. "Look up there for a moment while I talk to you," he said.
