Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/753

Rh talk. It was odd indeed that Natalie out of her silence could say so many things to him while he and this woman in all their years together had said nothing really touching each other's lives.

He looked from the motionless body of the older woman to his daughter and smiled. "I can enter into her," he thought exultant. "She cannot shut me out of herself, does not want to shut me out of herself." There was something in his daughter's face that told him what was going on in her mind. The younger woman now sat looking at the figure of the Virgin and it was evident that the dumb fright that had taken such complete possession of her when she was ushered abruptly into the room and the presence of the naked man was beginning a little to loosen its grip. In spite of herself she was thinking. There was the man, her own father, moving nude like a tree in winter about the room and occasionally stopping to look at her, the dim light, the Virgin with the candles burning beneath, and the figure of her mother lying on the bed. Her father was trying to tell her some story she wanted to hear. In some way it concerned herself, some vital part of herself. There was no doubt it was wrong, terribly wrong for the story to be told and for her to listen, but she wanted to hear the story now.

"After all I was right," John Webster was thinking. "Such a thing as has happened here might make or utterly ruin a woman of Jane's age, but as it is everything will come out right. She has a streak of cruelty in her too. There is a kind of health in her eyes now. She wants to know. After this experience she will perhaps no longer be afraid of the dead. It is the dead who are for ever frightening the living."

He took up the thread of his tale as he walked up and down in the dim light.

"A thing happened to your mother and me. I went to my friend's house in the early morning and your mother was to arrive on a train in the late afternoon. There were two trains, one at noon and the other in the afternoon about five, and as she would have to get up in the middle of the night to take the first one we all supposed she would come later. My friend and I had planned to spend the day hunting rabbits on the fields near town and we got back to his house about four.

"There would be time enough for us to bathe and dress ourselves before the guest arrived. When we got home my friend's mother and sister had gone out and we supposed there was no one in the