Two men once issued from the darkness and broke into a house. They came for robbery, but, finding an old man asleep in a chair, they murdered him. Then terrified at their deed, they fled, almost empty-handed, and so vanished into the night. Long afterwards they were overtaken by justice, confessed their crime and paid the penalty. Their sordid story is set down in the newspapers of the time. Otherwise they have passed into oblivion, and no man concerns himself with the dismal working of their souls. Their existence would not have found a mention here, were it not that the blow they dealt was the cause of convulsions in other lives.

For under the outer seeming of harmonious days and gentle living, often lies a smouldering train of devastating forces—stifled passions of greed and lust and jealousy, splendid heroisms and enthusiasms that burn white. In the common way of life no match is set; which forms a trite moral for the elegist.

But now and then the way of life is lit with lurid suddenness and the mine is sprung.

Beneath the surface of four gentle lives such a train was smouldering. The vulgar crime of the two nameless abjects set it ablaze. And they, issuing from the darkness for one ghastly moment, were but blind, almost impersonal instruments of Destiny, so far as they concerned these four.