white and
vivid, yet vague, broken and unfinished, because his mind refused to
join or finish them; things that were faceless and deformed, like white
bodies that tumble and toss in the twilight of evil dreams. These white
things came tumbling and tossing toward him from the gray confines of
the slime; urged by a persistent and abominable life, they were borne
perpetually on the darkness and were perpetually thrust back into it by
his terror.

He turned the letter and read it to the end, to the last scribble on the
margin: "You should have married a girl like Winny Dymond." "It was a
lie what I told you once about her." "You needn't be afraid of being
fond of Baby." There was nothing evocative, nothing significant for him
in these phrases, not even in the names. His mind had no longer any grip
on words. The ideas they stood for were blurred; they were without form
or meaning; they rose and shifted like waves, and like waves they
disappeared on the surface of the darkness and the slime.

He was roused from his sickening contemplation by a child's cry
overhead. It came again; it pierced him; it broke up the horror and
destroyed it. He woke with it to a sense of sheer blank calamity, of
overpowering bereavement.

His wife had left him. That was what had happened to him. His wife had
left him. She had left her little children.

It was as if Violet had died and her death had cleansed her.

When the child cried a third time he remembered Winny. He would have to
tell her.

CHAPTER XXIII

He rose and went to the fireplace mechanically. His impulse was to tear
up and burn Violet's letter and thus utterly destroy all proof and the
record of her shame. He was restrained by that strong subconscious
sanity which before now had cared for him when he was at his worst. It
suggested that he would do well to keep the letter. It was--it was a
document. It might have value. Proofs and records were precisely what he
might most want later on. He folded it and replaced it in its envelope
and thrust it into the breast pocket of his coat.

And it occurred to him again that he had got to tell Winny.

He could hear her feet going up and down, up and down, in the front room
overhead where she walked, hushing the crying baby. Presently the crying
ceased and the footsteps, and he heard the low humming of her cradle
song; then silence; and then the sound of her feet coming down the
stairs.

He would have to tell her now.

He dr