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'That is to be expected,' she answered, with a tinge of coldness, 'seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which tempted them into declaring in the frenzied tones I remember, that they would never speak to each other again—the bitterness might have, it must have lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance with which most people must regard each other.'

It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept to think of that little girl.

'You—you were present at the quarrel, the original one?' He dared not ask, and yet he must.

Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs, shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always seemed that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would come to outrageous ends. 'I'll never forget how I shivered, and my heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last I fell asleep there.' She went on with added constraint in her tone, 'And there I was in the morning.' They had passed her, the woman to her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its insensible form.