When she had turned the little headland she paused, and mechanically braided her hair.  Her fingers shook, and she breathed as if she had been running.  The incredible, the unbelievable, had pounced upon her as from a clear sky, and the world was never again to be the same.  She had been so sure, so safe, with her pleasant life all mapped out before her, like the raked and swept paths of an ordered and formal garden; a life in which reason and convention and culture and wealth should rule, and from which tumultuous and tormenting passions and disorderly emotions should be rigidly excluded.  In that ordered existence, she would be, if not happy, at least satisfied and proud.  And now!  A strange man in passing had looked into her eyes; love had come, and the gates of her formal garden had been pulled down, wild nature threatened to invade and overrun her trimmed and clipped borders and her smooth lawns.

The Widow Thatcher commented approvingly upon her fine color when she appeared at the house.

“You just stay here a leetle mite longer, Mis’ Riley, and you’ll be that changed you won’t know yourself,” said the kindly woman, heartily.

“I’m sure of that!” murmured her guest.

The red-haired lady who called herself Mrs. Riley—­Riley had been her mother’s name—­had been, up to this time, an altogether satisfying guest, simple, friendly, with a sound and healthy appetite, and well deserving that praiseful “nice, common sort of a woman” bestowed upon her.  Now, mysteriously, she changed.  She wasn’t less friendly, but her appetite was capricious and she would fall into reveries, sudden fits of gravity, sitting beside the window, staring somberly out at the waters.  She would snatch up her hat and go out, get as far as the gate, and return to the house.  Mrs. Thatcher heard her pacing up and down her room, when she should have been sound asleep.  She would laugh, and then sigh upon the heels of it, break into fitful singing, and fall into sudden silence in the midst of her song.

“She’s gettin’ religion,” the widow reflected.  “The Spirit’s workin’ on her.  ‘T ain’t nothin’ I can do except pray for her.”  And the simple soul got on her knees and besought Heaven that the stranger under her roof might “escape whatever trouble ’t is that’s threatenin’ her, O Lord, an’ save her soul alive!”

Although the widow didn’t know it, her guest had come to the dividing of the ways.  She had come to this quiet place to find peace, to rest, to escape from the world for a breathing-space.  And in this quiet place that which had missed her in the great outside world had come to her, the most tremendous of all powers had seized upon her.  The situation was not without a sly and ironical humor.

She wondered what Marcia would say if she should write to her:  “I have fallen in love at sight, hopelessly, irremediably, head over ears, with, a strange man who passed me on the shore.  He wears gray tweeds.  His name, I am told, is Johnston.  That’s all I know about him, except that I seem to have known him since the beginning of all things.  He is as familiar to my heart as my blood is, and all he had to do to make me love him was to look at me.  Yes!  I love him as I could never love anybody but him.  He’s the one man.”