In his pain, he ran about seeking solace. Yet, wherever he turned, he rejected help. He was afraid of Julia. In fact, she seemed scarcely at all in his mind. It was an effort to think of her. He had to force his brain to grasp the fact of her reality; and a concrete vision of what and how she was, became impossible. In his dreams, there was a looming, aching mass of agony which menaced him, or turned into a bath of luscious poison. This, he termed “Julia.” But it was not really she. It was an inchoate Thing--a thing untinged with the fixed meaning of a woman, a thing at most that a woman had engendered. So, fearing her, ignoring her, hoping for balm from her, not recking of her really, he at last sought her out. At once, before her, his storm subsided and became unreal; the swollen waves rolled languorously without aim or meaning. Even now, he scarcely saw her--and knew her not at all. The time of consciousness was passed. But it was sweet still, to be before her--helpless, mute,--while her smile glanced on him and her little, intimate movements,--the touch of her hand on her hair or the quiver of her eyelid,--cut through him like steel and played upon him like soft fingers upon a harp. In this way, pent-up, giving nothing out, came June. Quincy’s life rushed into summer, as a swift stream falls over a smooth precipice.... XIV The first agile months left him a vision of her. He believed it was herself. He remained motionless and the warm days glided over him. But this they left. And since the vision, too, was soft and warm and murmurous and madding, it seemed indeed a part of themselves that the first agile months had left. He could see her now; and fix his yearnings upon her; and recognize in the void a place where she was not. He could hear her. He could feel her. It mattered little that, as ever, he could not understand her. A slender, vibrant form she was, standing alone upon his consciousness, as the strip of ocean stands upon the beach. Beyond the horizon, it wanders infinitely. This was his sense of her. She had eyes that felt rather than saw; and fingers that played rather than touched; and the sharp, firm lines of her body bounded him, rather than herself. There was nothing after all, to this time, save the vision. Nature was not. Family was not. And then came the note. It was like the dawn--a haze of disparted color heralding the sun, formless, beingless save in this, that it was drenched in the sun’s coming. And then, from beneath the clouds of blue and green and orange, a spur of fire. This is without color. But it has all that the dawn lacked, for it has form and being. It is not the dawn; it is the sun. And before its flash of flame, the deep mists of radiance fade away--orange to red and red to green and blue to the low sky. Meantime, the sun has mounted. In this way came the note. It read: _Dear kind boy_: