The words repeated themselves again and again in what Rachel recognized as her own inner voice, although she felt that it was directed by some will beyond hers. The command sounded at first faintly, and she dismissed it as romantic fancy. It persisted, growing stronger as the day wore on.

“Go to the glade—”

At noon dinner she sat with the others, eating little, aware of the general conversation around her but taking no part in it except when addressed directly. As soon as she could do so without discourtesy and without raising questions about her health or disposition, she excused herself and slipped out of the house, pausing only to pick up a shawl she had dropped that morning in the office. Although the day was warm, the glade would be shady.

She managed to get away without anyone’s noticing her, no small achievement in so large a household with its many individual habits; and that seemed important to her, because a smaller voice, beyond the commanding one that had spoken, commended her to secrecy and solitariness.

She ran the last quarter mile, so anxious was she to be there, and when at last she arrived, she was panting for breath. After the briefest look around, she leaned against the big rock by the brook and rested, bunching the shawl into a cushion for her head. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds she knew so well. There was the light sweet rush of water over rocks, a trembling and sighing of leaves as the wind stirred them, and a way off a dog barked and then was quiet.

Another inner command: and she opened her eyes. Another: she turned her head. And there he was.

He was just then stepping into the glade. He came so silently, and the look of his face was so remote from anything she had ever seen there, it struck her at once that it was not Adam, but his ghost. She screamed and continued screaming until he ran to her and caught and held her, crying: “Rachel! My darling!”

Then she knew he was no ghost and wept with relief and joy. “You’re home. You are here!”

“Sh-sh. It’s all right. All right, my darling. Hush—”

“I was forlorn! Is it you?”

He laughed and held her away from him a moment so that they might look on each other.

“It is, it is you!”

“Yes!”

“It is you!”

“Sh-sh, hush—”

“Home!”

“Yes!”

“And well?”

“Thank God.”

“Oh, dear God, I thank you, thank you—” Alternately reassured and newly anxious, she had to touch him, hold him, kiss him, feel his hands and arms and lips and cheeks, look into his eyes, weep and laugh and say a hundred times and more that she loved him.