and soon is fast asleep; but when he
is safely snoring back creep all the guests out of the forest, hideous
and evil, warped and deformed, maimed and rotten with disease. They had
left the house, that he might be lured in it, knowing that he would
never come whilst they were there. And so they creep into all the
rooms, flinging their horrible shadows upon the gleaming walls, and
gradually they steal about the bed ...

Maggie forgot the end of the story. The traveller escaped, or perhaps
he did not. Perhaps he was strangled. But that moment of his awakening,
when his startled eyes first stared upon those horrible faces, those
deformed bodies, those evil smiles! What could one do, one naked and
defenceless against so many?

Maggie thought of this story during Martin's convalescence. She seemed
to see the evil guests, crowding back, one after the other into his
soul, and as they came back they peeped out at her, smiling from the
lighted windows. She saw that his plan was to thrust before her the
very worst of himself. He said: "Well, I've tried to get rid of her and
she won't go. That's her own affair, but if she stays, at least she
shall see me as I am. No false sentimental picture. I'll cure her."

It was the oldest trick in the world, but to Maggie it was new enough.
At first she was terrified. In spite of her early experience with her
father, when she had learnt what wickedness could be, she was a child
in all knowledge of the world. Above all she knew very little about her
own sex and its relation with men. But she determined that she must
take the whole of Martin; in the very first days of her love she had
resolved that, and now that resolution was to be put to the test. Her
terrified fear was lest the things that he told her about himself
should affect her love for him. She had told him years before: "It
isn't the things you've done that I mind or care about: it's you, not
actions that matter." But his actions were himself, and what was she to
do if all these things that he said were true?

Then she discovered that she had indeed spoken the truth. Her love for
him did not change; it rather grew, helped and strengthened by a
maternal pity and care that deepened and deepened. He seemed to her a
man really possessed, in literal fact, by devils. The story of the
lighted house was the symbol, only he, in the bitterness and defiance
of his heart, had invited the guests, not been surprised by them.

He pretended to g