My family was dear to me--not on the old hypocritical basis which would have pretended to a nearness that it did not feel. But dear through the only real basis, a basis which we had persistently baffled and inhibited all the while that we lived together: human understanding. CHAPTER XVIII I had planned to be back in the city by noon the next day. But there was something that I wanted to do before I left Katytown. I wanted to go into the little grove which, far more than the up-stairs place where I slept, had always seemed to me to be "my room." I went there after our early breakfast. The place was considerably thinned, but it was still sanctuary. When I reached the fence by the road, I went over it in the old way. As I went, I was conscious that some one, somewhere, was singing. As I struck into the road, the low humming which I had heard was mounting. And then it lifted suddenly into the words of its song. The man who was singing it had just passed, and he had his face set from me. But I knew him, as I knew his song. Then the time and the hour swept over me, and I sang with him: "Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem, Thy joys when shall I see...." He wheeled, and stood still in the road and let me come to him. And the song broke off, and he was saying: "Cosma! Cosma Wakely! I've come to scold you!" "It was such fun!" I pleaded. "But so to take in a near-sighted old gentleman who goes out of his mind trying to remember any of the thousand faces he sees in a year of lectures--ah, it was too bad. Why didn't you tell me?" "I was trying to get made over," I said. "And I'm not made over yet. You had no right to find me out! How did you find me out?" "I went to that gallery," he explained, "yesterday. And there I saw Gerald Massy's portrait of you--and underneath he has, you know, set 'Cosma.' I have never forgotten that name--how could I? So I came galloping home to accuse you. And there sat Mrs. Carney calling you 'Cosma,' before my eyes. What I can't understand," he ended savagely, "is how I can have been so dumb. Now, tell me--tell me!" We were walking in the road, which had somehow assumed a docile and appeased look, like something which we were stroking as it was meant to be stroked. And I told him the rest, beginning with the hour that he had left me in Twiney's pasture. And so we came to Twiney's pasture again. We broke through the wet sedge, and went over the fence as we had gone that other morning. And presently we stood at the top of the hill from which he had first shown me the whole world. Then I did my best to tell him. "Mr. Ember!" I said, "all the little bit I've been able to make out of myself, you've made. I want to tell you that--and I'm not telling it at all!" I cried. He stood as he had stood before, with the sky's great blue behind him. And he said: "Then just don't bother with it. Besides, I've something far more important to try to say to you--the best I know how. Cosma--will you marry me?"