Being very tired, Marcia went slowly up the walk. She sat on a chair on the veranda shaded by the big, widely branching maple tree, and there she tried to think. It was quiet and a robin was singing in the branches, but she found that her brain, her heart and her blood, were in such turmoil that she was unable to sit still. So she left the veranda, and following the street to where it reached the country, she took up a foot path across a meadow and at last she entered the wood behind the house where Jason had taken refuge as a child. Tired out at last, she sat on a log in the stillness of the deep wood, and there she tried again to think. But she found that instead of thinking, she was seeing things. As she looked at the dark floor of the forest with the great trees, the thickness of the bushes, she began to see a vision of the night of horror that a terrified boy must have spent there when he fled before the wrath of Martin Moreland. As if she really had shared that night with him she saw the things that had tortured him. She visioned his return to the deserted house and his grief and loneliness when he had found himself abandoned. She remembered what she had been told of the success that he had made of life, of how he had prospered in partnership with Peter Potter, and how his love of land had culminated in his efforts for Mahala and himself. Into her vision there came the pathetic figure of Rebecca, hiding the bloom and the beauty of her young face, proclaiming herself everywhere she went with her self-imposed emblem of purity, trying to convey to others the belief that possessed her that her soul was white even as she suffered torments in the fear that it was scarlet. Marcia thought of the long path over which Rebecca had journeyed. She even tried a mental estimate of the hundreds of miles that one woman’s feet had travelled, driven in insane unrest from point to point. She recalled having been told that in three different states the white flag had been seen, a voice had been bravely lifted exhorting every one to acknowledge the love of the Saviour, His power to heal. Marcia, in imagination, saw Rebecca’s waving banner gleaming in the light, her tireless eyes always searching from side to side, looking at the arms of every person carrying a child, peering into the little buggies in which women dragged after them the babies they had brought into life through love, and were permitted to keep. She thought of Rebecca a long time and wondered who her people might have been and where her home might be; she thought of the price that she had paid to protect her honour, and very slowly a resolve began forming in Marcia’s heart.