It seemed quite incredible that the dependent and affectionate man opposite her was the one who had filled her with fear and resentment such a short time ago.  She found herself actually laughing aloud once at the absurdity of it all.  Had her dread of him been fortuitous, his tyranny a mere sham?  Had he really liked her all the time, and had she been a sensitive fool?  She would have thought so, indeed, but for the memory of the perplexed and distracted face of her mother, the cringing and broken spirit of her who missed truth through an obsession of love.  No, no, a tyrant he had been, one of a countless army of them!

But now he leaned back on his seat very sad of eye, inert of gesture, without curiosity or much expectancy.  He let her do everything for him.  She felt her heart warming as she served him.  She could hardly keep herself from stooping to kiss his great brow; the hollows of his eyes when he was sleeping moved her to a passion of pity.  After all, he was her own; and now she had him again.  The bitterness of years began to die, and with it much of that secret, instinctive aversion to men—­that terror of being trapped and held to some uninspiring association or dragging task.

For now, when her father awoke from one of his many naps, he would turn to her with:  “Have I slept long, Kate?” or “We’ll be going in to lunch soon, I suppose, daughter?” or “Will it be very long now before we reach our destination?”

It was reached at dawn of an early autumn day, and they drove ten miles into the pine woods.  The scented silence took them.  They were at “God’s green caravansarie,” and the rancor that had poisoned their hearts was gone.  They turned toward each other in common trust, father and daughter, forgiving, if not all forgetting, the hurt and angry years.

“It really was your cousin who brought it about,” Kate wrote Honora.  “He reminded me that I was fortunate to have a father.  You see, I hadn’t realized it!  Oh, Honora, what a queer girl I am—­always having to think things out!  Always making myself miserable in trying to be happy!  Always going wrong in striving to be right!  I should think the gods would make Olympus ring laughing at me!  I once wrote your cousin that women of my sort were worn out with their struggle to reconcile their convictions and their instincts.  And that’s true.  That’s what is making them so restless and so strange and tumultuous.  But of course I can’t think it their fault—­merely their destiny.  Something is happening to them, but neither they nor any one else can quite tell what it is.”

* * * * *

Dr. Barrington was broken, no question about that.  Even the stimulation of the incomparable air of those Northern woods could not charge him with vitality.  He lay wrapped in blankets, on the bed improvised for him beneath the trees, or before the leaping fire in the inn, with the odors of the burning pine about him, and he let time slip by as it would.