rtments above. For several minutes nothing happened. His wife and her
unborn child were dead--that was all.

He ran upstairs thinking quickly. In the darkness on the lower stairway
he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as it turned out later,
there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes. The knife he later
washed carefully in the bathroom, when the excitement had died down a
little. He told everyone the same story. "There has been a holdup," he
explained. "A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and
my wife home. He followed us into the hallway of the building and there
was no light." The janitor had neglected to light the gas. Well there
had been a struggle and in the darkness his wife had been killed. He
could not tell how it had happened. "There was no light. The janitor had
neglected to light the gas," he kept saying.

For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to
get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and threw it away into the
river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting
under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings
he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure, who
was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.

And then he was arrested and right away he confessed--told everything.
He said he did not know why he had killed his wife and was careful to
say nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover
the motive for the crime. They are still trying. Some one had seen him
on the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged
into the affair and had her picture printed in the paper. That has been
annoying for her, as of course she has been able to prove she had
nothing to do with the man.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of
the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning. As I returned
out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose family
has so many and such strange ramifications. For a time he walked beside
me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog whined
and shivered. In the fog the old man's face was indistinct. It moved
slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and with the
tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and whose
name is being shouted in the pages of the