“Let him cry!” whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia, drawing her away into the hall.  A few moments later when they looked in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at peace, like that of a little child in sleep.  Crushed in one hand was the yellow sheet of paper covered with coarse, wavering marks.

CHAPTER XLV

  “That our soul may swim
  We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave”

The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother’s garden.  Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence’s condition, and Sylvia was just finishing an account of what had happened at home, when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed boy came whistling up the path.  He made an inquiry as to names, and handed Sylvia an envelope.  She opened it, read silently, “Am starting for America and you at once.  Felix.”  She stood looking at the paper for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness.  The boy asked, “Any answer?”

“No,” she said decisively, shaking her head.  “No answer.”

As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn, “Anything to pay?”

“No,” said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket, “Nothing to pay.”  He produced a worn and greasy book, “Sign on this line,” he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the path, whistling.  The transaction was complete.

Sylvia looked after the retreating figure and then turned to Judith as though there had been no interruption. “... and you can see for yourself how little use I am to him now.  Since he got Cousin Parnelia in the house, there’s nothing anybody else could do for him.  Even you couldn’t, if you could leave Lawrence.  Not for a while, anyhow.  I suppose he’ll come slowly out of this to be himself again ... but I’m not sure that he will.  And for now, I actually believe that he’d be easier in his mind if we were both away.  I never breathe a word of criticism about planchette, of course.  But he knows.  There’s that much left of his old self.  He knows how I must feel.  He’s really ever so much better too, you know.  He’s taken up his classes in the Summer School again.  He said he had ‘a message’ from Mother that he was to go back to his work bravely; and the very next day he went over to the campus, and taught all his classes as though nothing had happened.  Isn’t it awfully, terribly touching to see how even such a poor, incoherent make-believe of a ‘message’ from Mother has more power to calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts?  But how can he!  I can’t understand it!  I can’t bear it, to come in on him and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn’t care what I thought of him.  He doesn’t really care either.  He doesn’t think of anything but of having evening come when he can get another ‘message’ from Mother ... from Mother!  Mother!”