detain her, she had slipped away from him through
Kesiah's door, which she closed after her.

"Aunt Kesiah," he heard her exclaim joyously, "Jonathan is going to take
me to Old Church to spend to-morrow!"

Kesiah, in an ugly grey dressing-gown, tied at the waist with a black
cord, was drying Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator. At Molly's
entrance, she turned, and said warningly, "Patsey is rubbing Angela
after her bath. What was that about Old Church, dear?"

"Jonathan has promised to take me down there to-morrow."

"To spend the day? Well, I suppose we may trust you with him." From her
manner one might have inferred that the idea of not trusting anybody
with Jonathan would have been a joke.

She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator, as
if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall,
her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque, and sexless. But Molly was in
the mood when the need to talk--to let oneself go--is so great that the
choice of a listener is little more than an accident. She had discovered
at last--discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate--the
meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of
the last few months. Before she could understand what Abel had meant to
her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a
distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them. It was like
looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of
view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the
space it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel
in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he
towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning
sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and
the intoxication of magic was upon her. She had passed within the
Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes.

"Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly, and her voice thrilled, "were you
ever in love?"

Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expression of a person who has
been interrupted in the serious business of life by the fluttering of
a humming-bird. It required an effort for her to recede from the
comfortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from
which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than
the satisfactions of the body. Only for a few weeks