She still felt the sheer need of fatigue to purge away that inner weariness that had settled over her soul, so on second thoughts she turned homeward, and went on foot, through the paling English afternoon. Often, as a girl, she had walked in over the neighboring hills; and there seemed something more in keeping with her return to go back alone, and quietly. And as she walked she seemed to grow indifferent to even her own destiny. She felt herself as one gazing down on her own tangled existence with the cool detachment of a mere spectator. Yet this was the landscape of her youth, she kept telling herself, where she had first heard nightingales sing, where she had been happy and hopeful and looked out toward the unknown world with wide and wondering eyes. But the very landscape that once lay so large and alluring now seemed cramped and small and trivial. It seemed like a play-world to her, painted and laid out and overcrowded, like the too confining stage-scene of a theatre. The afternoon was already late when the familiar square tower of the church and the gray walls of the parsonage itself came into view. She gazed at them, abstracted and exalted, and only once she murmured: “How different, oh, how different!” Then she opened the gate of that quiet home, slowly and deliberately, and stepped inside. The garden was empty. One great, annihilating sponge-sweep seemed to wipe five long years, and all their mottled events, from her memory. Then as slowly and deliberately she once more closed the gate. The act seemed to take on that dignity attaching to the ceremonial, for with that movement, she passionately protested to herself, she was closing the door on all her past. CHAPTER VI It was one week later that Frances Candler wrote her second letter to Durkin. She wrote it feverishly, and without effort, impetuous page after page, until she came to the end. Then she folded and sealed it, hastily, as though in fear that some reactionary sweep of hesitation might still come between her and her written purpose.