Marya returns to St. Joseph’s, Marya is relieved that Father Shearing is no worse, that he “holds his own,” he’s stubborn, grim, funny, intermittently his old self. But his humor is slightly askew. When Marya visits him one Thursday afternoon in February another visitor drops by, and still another—and Father Shearing, flushed, animated, cries out wittily: “No one visits me for days and here you are all at once—a case of a single bird being killed by three stones.”

Marya grasps the sour subtle logic behind the remark but doesn’t laugh; the others, though they don’t quite comprehend, laugh uneasily. Is Father mocking them? What is he mocking? Marya, embarrassed, excuses herself and slips away early.

THIS IS THE afternoon she decides to skip supper, goes to the Royalton to see a movie. Her senses are so aroused, her mood so jangled—what else can she do? She wants something extreme. Glamorous, garish. Fated. Cruel. Her head is ringing with words she cannot say aloud, her blood pumps hot and steady, simply walking along Main Street at this time of day—early dusk, the stores closing, the streetlights and cars’ headlights just coming on—excites her powerfully. To be alone; to be alone as she is, in downtown Innisfail; not trapped in that overheated ill-smelling room at St. Joseph’s, or at the kitchen table at home; not fixed, not seen, in anyone’s mind except her own: what unexpected joy, verging upon ecstasy!

She doesn’t even mind the freezing wind. The uphill climb. The crowds milling past her, store clerks and office workers on their way home, shoppers, older schoolchildren like herself. No one knows her and she knows no one; by chance she doesn’t even glimpse a familiar face; she might be in a distant city and not Innisfail after all—a place of infinite possibility, of unguessed-at riches. It is so simple, Marya thinks, her heart swelling with certitude, she is happy; she is blessed. But she will be required to leave Innisfail to realize it.

That afternoon she makes herself slightly sick on popcorn, a box of mints, a stale chemical-tasting ice-cream sandwich devoured greedily in the dark. Each time she visits Father Shearing he urges her to take home something—anything—of the untouched candies and cookies and fruit on the windowsill; but Marya has always declined, worrying that a terrible greed, an incalculable hunger, might overcome her even in his presence. The very concept of appetite, he’s said, has become puzzling to him; he has been on a hospital diet of liquids and soft foods for so long, he can’t precisely remember . . . what it is he is trying to remember.