The night had been so strange, so terrible since one A.M. when the phone had summoned him out of a deep sleep to identify Edward’s body, that Orlando Fosca felt lifted up and borne deep on the tide, a tide so powerful that it left no room for personal feelings. He had moved through the interminable processes, going to Edward’s apartment with the police, finding and reading his last statement, telephoning Isabel Ferrier in California, trying to preserve what he could from the reporters, like an automaton. Then he had gone home and sat for hours in his chair in a state of extreme wakefulness. It was as if an explosion had taken place inside him and he were no longer an old man, but already dead himself and so beyond fatigue, almost beyond grief in any human sense of the word. His landlady had kindly brought him some lunch on a tray. Then perhaps he had dozed off. At any rate it was quite suddenly time for him to go over to Grace’s.

He stopped for a moment to look at the chestnut on Brattle Street, his old friend, one of a pair in front of an old house. A branch had fallen in a storm a few days before, and the wound was still there, a naked white gash, though the broken wood and leaves had been carted off. It was strange how intensely he wanted to see the wound closed, tarred over. So anxious about it was he that more than once he had had to restrain an impulse to ring the doorbell and inquire after the tree, make sure that some concern was felt, that surgeons would be sent for. He had known this tree in its splendid baroque flowering, in its summers of openhanded leaves, in its fruitful falls dear to the children, for so many years. Now standing here, in his hallucinated state, he poked a fallen chestnut with his stick till it cracked open to show the bright brown nut inside. And in doing this it was as if his self, which had been floating somewhere beyond reality, came back into him with the force of shock—and with it the full human burden, the full weight of what would be expected of him when he reached the indomitable old woman who waited for him now and whose heartbeat he felt as if in his own pulse.

When he reached the house, he did not stop to ring the bell, but pushed open the door as an impetuous young man might have done, went right to the drawing room where she was standing with her back to the fire, and pressed her to his heart.