Yet, on the day following the doctor’s funeral in Cambridge, I was receiving counsel from young Dr. McAllister in the same office where I had first seen Dr. Galbraith. That other day, the hygienic glare of gray walls and white wainscoting had combined with the blue shadows of snow-filled trees beyond the windows into a hard, glacial light. The old man’s skin had been green as if its natural yellow hue had been mixed with the blue shadows, and his eyes, pillowed by their pendulous sacs, had ambled sensually over me while his addled brain danced in bewilderment. The tall, bony elms of the hospital courtyard had whined and rattled and then, when the wind died, a company of discursive sparrows raised their voices in the hush. The only other sign of animation to be seen from the window was a solitary pigeon promenading over the slate roof of an adjacent ward about whose red chimney wound the steam from two small exhausts.

The new occupant sat before the open windows through which, gentle and billowing, came the May day’s limbering breezes and edgeless light. The world beyond was spacious and subtly illuminated; the landscape, perhaps as much as the young doctor’s adroit kindness, loosed the strictures of my terror, and after my first ferocious declaration that my mother was insane, I was able to speak without a stutter.

Dr. McAllister was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty; he was spare and angular and erect and his obvious good health recommended him, whereas Dr. Galbraith’s diseased complexion and unstrung manner had made him seem, from the very beginning, an uncertain ally. The tone of the young man’s voice was restorative, for he was at once casual so that my story seemed automatically less calamitous than I had thought, and authoritative so that I knew I could depend upon him.

I had come to him because I had not wanted to consult Dr. Roberts, who, being a good friend of Dr. Brunson, might, despite his professional ethics, drop a few hints to the dentist. I wished, so far as possible, to keep secret this new excitement of our household. To be sure, everyone in Chichester had said for years that my mother was mad, and the children who had used to come to play up towards our house no longer came. The villagers and the shopkeepers had, after Ivan’s death, stopped inquiring about her. But still, they had no proof.