The old chestnut tree on Brattle Street had flowered and shed its leaves five times since Orlando Fosca had been so troubled when a branch was blown down, had had an impulse to go in and ask whether surgeons had been sent for, had stopped to see in the wounded tree a symbol of the University itself, just so wounded by the death of Edward Cavan. The tarred break was hardly noticeable now; on her short walks Grace Kimlock sometimes wondered exactly where the branch had been, how the tree had looked; one no longer felt absence in the air, or looked for leaves where there were none. The absence of Orlando himself was another matter. A dozen times a day she felt the impulse to phone him, then sat down with the instrument in her hands, abstracted until Ellen roused her. Orlando had died quite suddenly a year before, late at night, of a brain hemorrhage while he worked at his desk. He was found only the next morning. Since then Grace Kimlock had felt surrounded by ghosts, for the first time in her long life really afraid of the present, a present which bewildered her. There seemed nothing to hang onto at all in this time when the renegade and the informer were the heroes of the day and the things one had always taken for granted like honor, trust, the very foundations of the human compact, were being subtly undermined. Lately she had almost entirely withdrawn from public life, and saw only very old friends like Damon. She was quite suddenly an old lady.

Yet on this morning she woke with some of her former battling self back in play; as if to underline the importance of the day she took out the cameo brooch Edward had given her with Pallas Athene on it and clasped it firmly to her new bright blue blouse, and as she peered at herself in the mirror to be sure it was not on crooked, she lifted her chin and gave a little wry smile, as if to say, “We’re not dead yet, old thing.”

In the kitchen Ellen and the cook noted that she had eaten almost no breakfast. “She’s that excited. It’s about Mr. Phillips, you may be sure, the poor man. He’s to be questioned, you know. They’re after him,” Ellen said gloomily. She was not very sure who “they” were, but she had heard Grace telephoning all day yesterday, summoning the thinning ranks to the open session of a Washington Committee sent down to look into communism at Harvard University.

“She’s afraid he’ll lose his temper, the poor man, that’s what she’s got so nervy about,” cook answered.

“As well he might,” Ellen answered. “Prying into people’s affairs——”

“Well it’s a dangerous time and you never know,” cook said shaking her head. “They have to do their job like the rest of us.”