Very slowly, very delicately, had knowledge unfolded within her.  On a day there had been pain, and nothing.  On a day there had been thrilling peace, and luminous wings beating so strong, so sure....

To love; to love unasked....

She knew that women thought this a shame to them; she had thought it so herself.  Yet could it be?  Had he not taught her this, or nothing, that to give was ever a finer thing than to take?  Was it a shame to love what was lovable, and fine and beautiful and sweet?  Ah, no; surely the shame for her would be, knowing these things now at their value, not to love them, to hold back thriftily for the striking of a bargain.  Was not here, and no otherwhere, the true badge of the inferior, to measure the dearest beats of one’s heart as a prudent trader measures?

So Cally Heth, the often loved and lovely, was strong to feel on her wonderful day.  Beneath the maiden’s invincible reserve, under the mad sweetness of this unrest, clear upon that Future which was so enveloped in a golden haze, she felt a pride in her own human worthiness, as one who now does the best thing of her life.  She had always wanted to love above her:  how time and this man had invested her ideal with a richer meaning!...  Was not this the touchstone of that change within herself she had sought, that day when Colonel Dalhousie’s rod had chastened her?

Many symbols of happiness had shone and beckoned about her, and she had turned her back on all of them to follow a man in a patched coat whose power was only that he spoke simply of God, and believed in the goodness of his fellows.  Over the gulf that lay between their worlds, this man had called to her:  and now she had made him her last full response, which was herself.  He was the saint in her life; and she had found him beneath all disguises, and laid her heart at his feet.

* * * * *

Home again; dreams laid by.  There was action for a space.  Anticipation painted the world in rose.

It was after four; by the clock on the mantel.  Cally stood at the window, dressed, waiting.  She was bound for a workers’ meeting in a somewhat dilapidated Settlement House in the slums, which only the other day had been an abandoned hotel, for cause.  And never in her vivid life had she dressed with greater care....

She gazed down, upon a street which she did not see.  Ten minutes past four:  but twenty minutes more, out of the long day.  By now, he had already left the Works for the Dabney House....  And she was thinking that never but once had he made a personal remark to her:  when he had thought, among the hard things, that she was lovely to the eye.  But all that was a long, long time ago....

From the door below there issued her mother’s guests, departing.  Two strolled away up the afternoon street; one drove off in an open car; two stepped into an old-fashioned family carriage.  Then, after a little interval, Mrs. Heth herself came out with two more women; and these three drove away in the Byrd car, which had been observed waiting down there.