CAPTAIN. [Rises]. Laura, save me and my reason. You don't seem to
understand what I say. If the child is not mine I have no control
over her and don't want to have any, and that is precisely what you
do want, isn't it? But perhaps you want even more--to have power
over the child, but still have me to support you.

LAURA. Power, yes! What has this whole life and death struggle been
for but power?

CAPTAIN. To me it has meant more. I do not believe in a hereafter;
the child was my future life. That was my conception of
immortality, and perhaps the only one that has any analogy in
reality. If you take that away from me, you cut off my life.

LAURA. Why didn't we separate in time?

CAPTAIN. Because the child bound us together; but the link became a
chain. And how did it happen; how? I have never thought about this,
but now memories rise up accusingly, condemningly perhaps. We had
been married two years, and had no children; you know why. I fell
ill and lay at the point of death. During a conscious interval of
the fever I heard voices out in the drawing-room. It was you and
the lawyer talking about the fortune that I still possessed. He
explained that you could inherit nothing because we had no
children, and he asked you if you were expecting to become a
mother. I did not hear your reply. I recovered and we had a child.
Who is its father?

LAURA. You.