The limousine sped northward into the country. She watched the placid fields, the wooded hill-tops, the lanes that wound away between walls of sumac. She thought of another unexpected ride toward another crisis of life. Her heart was beating wildly; her breathing was labored; her hands twitched open and shut. She took the mirror from its rack, and saw her pupils extraordinarily dilated, so that her eyes appeared black. The car left the highway, to enter a park of well-grown trees. She caught sight of the low, simple mass of the house; its walls of gray plaster rising between two clumps of evergreens, beyond a garden laid out in grassy stages, where flagstone paths wound away between beds of heliotrope. On the terrace, under an awning of striped canvas, stood a man in a dark-blue robe that opened down the front to reveal a white under robe confined with a scarlet sash. He had a close-fitting skullcap on his head, of white, embroidered linen. He was Hamoud-bin-Said. She passed him without a second glance, and found herself face to face with the physician, who was just starting back to town. Dr. Fallows began to talk to her judicially and suavely, with a tone of regret, but possibly with an undertone of contentment: for this case, after having immensely bewildered him for a time, was now, at last, imitating all the proper symptoms again. The patient's recent improvement had been due, no doubt, to one of those rallies that may interrupt the progress of many diseases--though in a case of this sort, whether due to a functional or a pathological cause, Dr. Fallows had never seen nor heard of an arrest--much less a diminution--of the general weakness. But now the relapse was complete. She was aware of a lot of fluted wainscotting around her, and, beyond Dr. Fallows' head, a Tudor staircase in silhouette against a large bay window of many leaded panes. Some of these panes, of stained glass in heraldic patterns, gleamed against a passing cloud like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires that had lost their fire. Dr. Fallows still blocked her way--almost another Brantome!--engrossed in his pessimistic peroration, his visage of an urbane, successful man full of complicated satisfactions and regrets. Behind him the staircase was suddenly bathed in sunshine; all the panes of stained glass became sparkling and rich; and a sheaf of prismatic rays stretched down, through the gloom of the hall, toward Lilla's upturned face. She sped up the staircase. All that she saw was the four-post bedstead canopied with cretonne, the face on the pillow. At her approach, a thrill passed through the air pervaded by the stagnation of his spirit. He opened his eyes. "You! I thought I had unchained you." She knelt down beside him, and asked: "What have I done to deserve this?" He managed to respond: "You deserve more, perhaps--a worldful of blessings. But this release is all that I have to give you."