She walked more heavily on her heels, on flat sandals, as the natives walked, and although she weighed exactly the same as when she had first arrived, a medium weight, she felt heavier, and more aware of her body. The swimming, the sun, the air, all contributed to sculpture a firm, elastic, balanced body, free in its movements.

She was preparing herself to talk to the Doctor, as he had wanted her to talk. She had awakened with a clear image of the Doctor's character.

Doctor Hernandez in the taxi, the first day, concerned over his village's state of health, aware of others' moods and needs, unable to forget the secret sorrow of his own life. Doctor Hernandez probing into her life with a doctor's conviction of his right to probe, and evading her questions.

She had seen him in his home, in a Spanish setting, and met his wife, who had come for one of her brief visits. Under a semblance of Latin submission, under her thoughtfulness in serving him his drink, saving him from telephone calls, there was a mockery in his wife's attitude toward his patients. This had been instilled in the children who played the game of "being a doctor" differently from other children; they expressed distaste for his profession. The sick were not really sick, and the sick who came from the poor, with the desperate illnesses that attacked the undernourished natives, both children and wife totally ignored.

Lillian had seen in the Doctor's eyes a sadness which seemed out of proportion to the children's irony. He watched them perform their doctor act. The patient was a beautiful movie star. She was covered with bandages. Doctor Hernandez's daughter took this role. As soon as the "doctor" came near to her, she herself unwound all the bandages, threw herself upon him, embraced him and said: "Now that you have come I am not sick any more."

This morning as she walked, all these fragments had coalesced into the figure of a man in trouble, and Lillian understood that his persistence in making her confess was a defense against all that he himself wanted to confess.

At first she had not understood the game, nor his need. But she did now. And even if it meant that first of all (to play it as he wished it) she must confide in him, she was now willing, because it would liberate him of his secret. It was a habitual role for him to take: that of confessor. In any other role he would be uncomfortable.

The street climbed halfway up the hill, and there was the Doctor's office. The waiting room was a patio, with wicker chairs placed between potted palms and rubber plants. Pink and purple bougainvillaea trailed down the walls. A servant in bedroom slippers was mopping the mosaic floor. The nurse was not dressed like a nurse but, like all the native girls who worked in Golconda, she wore a party dress, a rose pastel taffeta which made her seem much more like a nurse to pleasure than to illness. There were ribbons in her hair, and sea-shell earrings on her ears.