“Oh!” I cried, suddenly maddened by his easy manner and wishing to wipe that distracting smile from his mouth.

“Maisie.” His hand was upon my wrist. I looked down at his brown fingers. “What would your heart speak right now?”

“Now?” I repeated. “At this moment?” My eyes filled suddenly as he bent and placed his ear gently next to my chest as if to listen, and my soul expanded then, simply flew. And my hand, seeming of its own accord, rested upon his neck and held him to me, though I could speak no more. “That it was full,” I whispered.

“And free,” he urged.

I stepped back. “No, Bart—I am not free.”

“You are,” he asserted.

I was quiet a moment, struggling to speak what else beat in my full heart. “Once, I thought I, too, might be a girl whose proud spirit did not need traffic in the ordinary world—a Brontë girl, who cleaved herself from settee and sitting room and death, who cheated death.” I fairly spat out the words. “But I am not such a one. I am …”

He waited.

“So entangled.” I could scarcely breathe in my sorrow, for the double image of Papa gazing up at me in such pain upon his bed and of Mama’s relief when I was returned to her from Miss Grange’s attic suffused my vision. How might I take up my own heart when their wishes beat so visibly before me?

He raised up his head and kissed the base of my throat. “Here.” He put a finger where his lips had been. “Here is where I will rest—where your heart rises up.”

“But Bart,” I asked, the tears in my eyes, “where do we stand?”

“Where we are,” he answered simply.

I looked long into his face. Here was I caught beyond the breakwater, in waters toward which I had not meant to travel, and yet how easily, how gladly, I had swum right to them. I turned quickly and began walking homeward; and though Bart called again, “Maisie,” I kept walking through the grasses and out onto the cut lawn, across the pebbled back driveway, and around the House. I climbed the piazza stairs, passed through the public rooms, and climbed the main house stairs, until finally I reached my room. I had hardly passed over the threshold before I leaned my forehead against the closed door and gave myself to a hot storm of weeping.

“Maisie?” Mama’s drowsy voice issued from her bed.

I sniffed, but the tears still came.

“Maisie? What is the matter?” I could hear Mama sitting up among her covers.

“Oh, Mama.” And I turned and crossed through into her room and flung myself, still weeping, into her arms.

Startled, she patted my head, her hands still heavy with sleep. And I lay there quietly in her lap for a time.

“Maisie?” Mama asked again.

I turned my tearstained face to her.