where she had to pass under the questioning eyes of her sister the school-teacher, also a silent woman, and to withstand a fiery outbreak from her mother who came to the door to shout questions after her down the street, Natalie came back along the railroad tracks to find John Webster waiting for her in the darkness by the office door. Then they walked boldly through the streets and went into the country and, when they had got upon a country road, went hand in hand, for the most part in silence.
And from day to day, in the office and in the Webster household the feeling of tenseness grew more and more pronounced.
In the house, when he had come in late at night and had crept up to his room, he had a sense of the fact that both his wife and daughter were lying awake, thinking of him, wondering about him, wondering what strange thing had happened to make him suddenly a new man. From what he had seen in their eyes in the day-time he knew that they had both become suddenly aware of him. Now he was no longer the mere bread-winner, the man who goes in and out of his house as a work horse goes in and out of a stable. Now, as he lay in his bed and behind the two walls of his room and the two closed doors, voices were awakening within them, little fearful voices. His mind had got into the habit of thinking of walls and doors. "Some night the walls will fall down and the two doors will open. I must be ready for the time when that happens," he thought.
His wife was one who, when she was excited, resentful, or angry, sank herself into an ocean of silence. Perhaps the whole town knew of his walking about in the evening with Natalie Swartz. Had news of it come to his wife she would not have spoken of the matter to her daughter. There would be just a dense kind of silence in the house and the daughter would know there was something the matter. There had been such times before. The daughter would have become frightened, perhaps it would be just at bottom the fear of change, that something was about to happen that would disturb the steady even passage of days.
One noon, during the second week after the love-making with Natalie, he walked towards the centre of town, intending to go into a restaurant and eat lunch, but instead walked straight ahead down the tracks for nearly a mile. Then, not knowing exactly what impulse had led him, he went back to the office. Natalie and all the
