In spite of knowing that I would get a dressing-down, I dallied along the way. This garden-filled and springtime world through which I moved was perfumed with the closely clustered lilac blossoms in the yards I passed, roofed over by a coral, turquoise, and violet sky. The heard, but unseen, white skirts of the sea fluttered sweetly against its boundaries. Just as Nathan’s kisses in the fog had warmed my sorrow to its bloom, and my love, though contiguous, had only served to enhance its somber colors, so the young physician’s accidental exhumation of Boston had, immediately afterwards, caused me to see the loveliness of Chichester to which for several months I had been indifferent. And now, stopping to bury my face in a branch of lilac in a sudden infiltration of an unobjectified but passionate happiness, the purpose of my interview seemed to me to be but a tenth part of what had been accomplished, and the least important part, as if my fear that Mamma was insane had been only an excuse to know Dr. McAllister and had been, in a sense, almost as trumped up as my “message” from Miss Pride.

He had said, “We should not rush ahead to conclusions, but you should think this over. Let us say you keep her at home, protect her for the better part of your life so that you don’t marry or don’t realize whatever your ambition is. Would the martyrdom be worth all that? It’s the question you must answer for yourself, for salvation for one soul is perdition for another and what might send me to hell would give you grace.” His lofty terms, martyrdom, salvation, perdition, grace, were no longer the mere names of abstract states over which I had carelessly slid my eye on the printed page, but were the components of my own future, and I said “grace” aloud, my lips stopped by the dense purple trumpets of the flower I had pressed against them. My happiness confounded me. As though it were as perishable as the crisp lilac, I allowed no thought to come near it and refused to listen to the voices within the house behind the hedge which, organ of their owners’ uncertainty, talked back and forth of the likelihood of rain. But the footsteps which I heard coming behind me, I did allow to intrude upon my mind, thinking perhaps they belonged to the doctor on his way home—his home? I questioned, but could see him only behind the desk in Dr. Galbraith’s office where the white marquisette curtains were inflated by the breeze. The footsteps were quick and the heel-taps rang brashly on the sidewalk. Someone called my name, but there was no need to turn, for Nathan Kadish was beside me and had put his shoulder behind mine. When I saw his face, it was the good side at which I looked.