“And as he caught up his pony’s reins and mounted, the phrase Nell Grange had recited swum up again onto the surface of his mind: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.’ Though she had hideously twisted its meaning, he was struck by the coincidence of hearing his own pet phrase upon the lips of the young woman. For though it was unorthodox, this was the phrase the doctor himself had most often used to imagine the unimaginable, especially considering the female sex, plucking this doctrine from its proper place and making of it a gentle reminder of the female body—a a promise, as it were, from God. Housed within a woman, the doctor thought, were rooms of undisclosed shapes and sizes, and a woman may live a life and never open but two or three, and live within them quite happily. But there were those who twisted and turned within the windy stairwells of their selves, opening doors to rooms and peering in upon possible worlds unmatched in the exterior.

“But who was the woman who would abandon her dying child? Worse still, who was the mother who would exhort such a breach? That was a room he had not seen before; nor had he supposed it existed within. Yet he could not believe Cassie Grange could possibly have told the truth. It did not stand to reason, he thought, for she had been tireless in her youth at the bedsides of young mothers; hers had been the quickest catching hands, hers the gentlest touch upon the babe newly dropped to our world. How could such a one have left behind her own to die? He dismounted in his stable yard.

“Yet her strange preoccupation bespoke an unquiet conscience. And he thought again of Cassie appearing over and over, often unbidden, to help a laboring mother. As if she wished to be the first to welcome each new soul, he thought uneasily. As if she stood at the gate hoping to see her lost little one come through once more. His hand paused upon his own home gate at such thoughts, and—it must be said—he turned round and stared into the gloom behind him down the road upon which he had just come from Grange House.