She had forgotten, too, that, while she waited, time had been at work, busily adding its make-weights on this side or on that. She had forgotten that people alter ... that places alter ... that she herself, even in the iron mould of her obsession, might possibly alter.... Behind her set face she was filled with fear that some still-unnoticed change might tip the scale against her. So many ages seemed to have fled since the joy of the morning that she peered back at it with dim eyes as at some memory of childhood. Yet the steps by which she had come to this pass had been so swift that her brain swam at their mere remembrance. But they had only seemed swift because of the suddenness with which revelation after revelation had been sprung upon her. The truths lying behind those changes of thought and scene must have been growing in secret for many a long year. It was not only the whinings of Cousin Jessie which had taken her courage from her, stealing it, hour by hour, as if it was her very life-blood that they drained. The dream itself had undermined it, puzzling and depressing her even while it glorified and exalted. She remembered the Questions, and shrank from the finger of warning which they so obviously had pointed. And she remembered that Ellen ... but she was still too bruised and shocked to dare to dwell upon Ellen. And after the dream there had been other portents and signs, each of them, as it were, putting out an unseen arm in order to stay her. All day long she had been called to attention by the things about her, as well as by the sudden, unwished-for rising of old memories. Both within and without, as it were, she had been attacked, and before each attack had retreated a step further. All day long it had been brought home to her that she was exchanging the substance for the shadow, and that, in her insistence upon Canada, she was cutting herself off from the things which really mattered. She said to herself angrily, as if accusing some outside power, that she had not known that places and houses could hold you against your will. She had tried to keep herself free, like a soldier awaiting his orders, and she had never once been free. Not only that, but it was she herself who had been forced to betray herself. Even while she was nursing and keeping warm her hatred of her surroundings, her heart was beginning to love them. Even while she had imagined herself to be facing steadily forward, she was already beginning to look back. Dick Nelson had been right in saying that, no matter how you might fight against it, you were bound to settle, in the end. She had been angry about it, at the time, angry and contemptuous, but she saw what he meant now. The gardens had grown no wider for her as time went on, but they had grown deeper. She had taken root.... It seemed as if the place where you had suffered held you as surely in the end as the place where you had been content....