Because of those gray hours of dawn and shame and self-knowledge, love did not end in David, nor did he cease to be rational and inarticulate; there had to be weeks of silent, vehement refusal to accept the situation: something must be done! Elizabeth must get a divorce "somehow"! It would take time, a long time, perhaps; but she must get it, and then they would marry. There had to be weeks of argument: "why should I sacrifice my happiness to 'preserve the ideal of the permanence of marriage'?" There had to be weeks of imprisonment in himself before a night came when his mother woke to find him at her bedside: "Mother--mother--mother," he said. What else he said, how in his agonizing dumbness he was able to tell her that she was the mother, not, indeed, of his body, but of his soul--was only for her ears; what his face, hidden in her pillow, confessed, the quiet darkness held inviolate. This silent man's experiences of shame and courage, began that night when, in the fire-lit room, besieged by darkness and the storm, that other experience ended. Blair's opportunity--the divine opportunity of sacrifice, had its beginning in that same desolate End. But there had to be angry days of refusing to recognize any opportunity--life had not trained him to such courageous recognition! There had to be days when the magnanimity of his prisoner in returning to her prison was unendurable to him. There had to be months, before, goaded by his god, he urged his hesitating manhood to abide by the decision of chance whether or not he should offer her her freedom. There even had to be days of deciding just what the chance should be! There had to be for these three people, caught in the mesh of circumstance, time for growth and for hope, and that is why their story pauses just when the angel has troubled the water. All the impulses and the resolutions that had their beginnings in that End, are like circles on that troubled water, spreading, spreading, spreading, until they touch Eternity. At first the circles were not seen; only the turmoil in the pool when the angel touched it. And how dark the water was with the sediment of doubt and fear and loss in the days that followed that decision which was the beginning of all the circles! Robert Ferguson and David's mother used to wonder how they could any of them get through the next few months. "But good is going to come out of it somehow," Helena Richie said once. "Oh, you mean 'character' and all that sort of thing," he said, sighing. "I tell you what it is, I'm a lot more concerned about my child's happiness than her 'character.' Elizabeth is good enough for me as she is."