May sat in the darkness in her room in the Edgley house having such thoughts as had never come to her before and the night seemed alive as no other night of her life had been. For her gods walked abroad in the land. The Edgley house was but a poor little affair of boards—of thin walls—and she looked out, in the dim wavering light of the night, into a field, that at times during the year became a bog where cattle sank in black mud to their knees. Her town was but a dot on the huge map of her country—she knew that. It was not necessary to travel to find out. Had she not been at the top of her class in geography? In her country alone lived some sixty, eighty, a hundred million people—she could not remember the number—it changed yearly. When the country was new millions of buffalo walked up and down on the plains. She was a she-calf among the buffalo but she had found lodgment in a town, in a house made of boards and painted yellow, but the field below the house was dry now and long grass grew there. However, tiny pools remained and frogs lived in them and croaked loudly while crickets sang in the dry grass. Her life was sacred—the house in which she lived, the room in which she sat, became a church, a temple, a tower. The lie she had told had started a new force within her and the new temple, in which she was to live, was now being built. Thoughts like giant clouds, seen in a dim night sky, floated through her mind. Tears came to her eyes and her throat seemed to be swelling. She put her head down on the window sill and convulsive sobs shook her. That was, she knew, because she had been brave enough and quick-witted enough to tell the lie, to re-establish the romance of existence within herself. The foundation stone for the temple had been laid. May did not think anything out clearly, did not try to do that. She felt—she knew her own truth. Words heard, read in books in school, in other books loaned her by the schoolteachers, words said casually, without feeling—by thin-lipped, flat-breasted young women who were teachers at the Sunday school, words that had seemed as nothing to her when said, now made a great sound in her mind. They were repeated to her in stately measure by some force, seemingly outside herself and were like the steady rhythmical tread of an army marching on earth roads. No, they were like rain on the roof over her head, on the roof of the house that was herself. All her life she had lived in a house and the rains had come unheeded—and the words she had heard and now remembered were like rain drops falling on roofs. There was a subtle perfume remaining. “The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner.”