Unless you peremptorily forbid, I am going to bring on a crisis between those two. I am going to tell Evelyn what Kilgariff has done for her in the matter of this trust fund. When she knows that, there will be a scene of some sort between them, and I think we may trust love and human nature to bring it to a happy conclusion. If you will recall what occurred when the trust papers were executed and given to us three, you will remember that no promise of secrecy was exacted of us. It is true we quite understood that we were to say nothing to Evelyn about the matter until the proper time should come; but we three are sole judges as to what is the proper time, and Agatha and I are both of the opinion that the proper time is now. Unless you interpose your veto, therefore, I shall act upon that opinion, making myself spokeswoman for the trio. Please send me a line in a hurry. To this Dorothy replied by the messenger who had brought the note. She wrote but a single sentence, and that was a Biblical quotation. She wrote:— Now is the accepted time: behold, now is the day of salvation. On the evening before the day appointed for Evelyn’s return to Wyanoke, Dorothy received a second note from Edmonia, saying:— I don’t know whether we have done wisely or otherwise. For once Evelyn is inscrutable. We have told her of Kilgariff’s splendid generosity, and we can’t make out how she takes it. She has grown very silent and somewhat nervous. She is under a severe emotional strain of some kind, but of what kind we do not know. A storm of some sort is brewing, and we must simply wait to learn what its character is to be. Evelyn is proud and exceedingly sensitive, as we know. And there is a touch of the savage in her—or rather the potentiality of the savage—and in a case where she feels so strongly, it may result in an outbreak of savage anger and resentment. We needn’t worry, however, I think. Even such an outbreak would in all probability turn out well. Every storm passes, you know; and when the clouds clear away, the skies are all the bluer for it. When a man and a woman love each other and don’t know it, or don’t let each other know it, any sort of crisis, any sort of emotional collision, is apt to bring about a favourable result. Evelyn spent that evening in her room, writing incessantly, far into the night. She wrote a letter to Kilgariff. When she read it over, she tore it up. “It reads as if I were angry,” she said to herself, “and anger is not exactly what I feel. I wonder what I do feel.” Then she wrote another letter to Kilgariff, and put it aside, meaning to read it after a while. In the meantime she wrote long and lovingly to Dorothy, telling her she had decided not to return to Wyanoke, but to go to Petersburg instead, and help in nursing the soldiers.