d to ask what she should say further.
Should she speak of his coming home? No. Since the address he had given
her indicated that he was on his way, it was best that he should take
the responsibility of his own return. Should she tell him that
Sweetapple thought he had seen Claude? No. It would alarm him without
doing any good. If Claude was back, he was back--besides which,
Sweetapple might be wrong. So she signed her name with her usual
significant abruptness, sealing the envelope and addressing it.

Her hesitation came in putting on the stamp. Somehow the letter seemed
too cold to send. She didn't want to be cold--only to be sincere.
Sincerity during these weeks of solitude had become a sort of obsession.
She couldn't tell him that she had forgiven him as long as resentment
lingered in her heart, and yet she was anxious not to wound him more
than she could help. Wounding him she wounded herself more deeply, for
in spite of everything his pain was hers.

Slowly she tore the letter open again, to a sunset chorus of birds of
whose song she had just become conscious. From tree to tree they fluted
to one another and answered back, now with a reckless, passionate
warble, now with a long, liquid love-note. It was the voice of the rich
world that lay around her--a world of flowers and lawns, and meadows and
upland woods, and cool, deep shades and mellowing light. But it was also
the voice that had accompanied her into the enchanted land on that
winter's day when Thor had kissed her wrist. The day seemed now
immeasurably far away in time, and the enchanted land had been left
behind her; but the voice was still there, fluting, calling, reminding,
entreating, with an insistence that almost made her weep.

She wrote hurriedly in postscript: "If there was ever anything I could
do for you, dear Thor, perhaps what I used to feel would come back to
me. If it only would! If I could only be great and generous and
inexacting as you would be! I want to be, Thor darling; I long to be;
but I am like a person paralyzed, whose limbs no longer answer to his
will. I pray for recovery and restoration--but will it ever come?"

As encouragement to Thor she was no more satisfied with this than with
what she had said earlier, but it expressed all she could allow herself
to say. Anything more would have permitted him to infer such things as
he had permitted her to infer, an accident that must have no repetition.
She ended the note definitely, get