s throat began to hurt and his teeth chattered. His
feet on the study floor felt like two cakes of ice.
Still he would not give up. "I will see this woman and
will think the thoughts I have never dared to think,"
he told himself, gripping the edge of the desk and
waiting.

Curtis Hartman came near dying from the effects of that
night of waiting in the church, and also he found in
the thing that happened what he took to be the way of
life for him. On other evenings when he had waited he
had not been able to see, through the little hole in
the glass, any part of the school teacher's room except
that occupied by her bed. In the darkness he had waited
until the woman suddenly appeared sitting in the bed in
her white nightrobe. When the light was turned up she
propped herself up among the pillows and read a book.
Sometimes she smoked one of the cigarettes. Only her
bare shoulders and throat were visible.

On the January night, after he had come near dying with
cold and after his mind had two or three times actually
slipped away into an odd land of fantasy so that he had
by an exercise of will power to force himself back into
consciousness, Kate Swift appeared. In the room next
door a lamp was lighted and the waiting man stared into
an empty bed. Then upon the bed before his eyes a naked
woman threw herself. Lying face downward she wept and
beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final
outburst of weeping she half arose, and in the presence
of the man who had waited to look and not to think
thoughts the woman of sin began to pray. In the
lamplight her figure, slim and strong, looked like the
figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the
leaded window.

Curtis Hartman never remembered how he got out of the
church. With a cry he arose, dragging the heavy desk
along the floor. The Bible fell, making a great clatter
in the silence. When the light in the house next door
went out he stumbled down the stairway and into the
street. Along the street he went and ran in at the door
of the Winesburg Eagle. To George Willard, who was
tramping up and down in the office undergoing a
struggle of his own, he began to talk half
incoherently. "The ways of God are beyond human
understanding," he cried, running in quickly and
closing the door. He began to advance upon the young
man, his eyes glowing and his voice ringing with
fervor. "I have found the light," he cried. "After ten
years in this town, God has manifested hi