When the clock struck again, Lily and John Fay said good-night. Lily was to come once more before her boat sailed.
Hagar looked at Fay. "You are going to England, too?"
"He's just built a great bridge," said Lily, "and he hasn't really taken a holiday for years. Robert and I want him just as long as he will travel with us."
When they were gone, Hagar went to the window and looked out far and wide upon the city settling to its rest. Here, to-night, would be deep repose, here fevered tossing, here perhaps no sleep at all. There would be death chambers and birth chambers--a many of each. And spiritual death chambers and spiritual birth chambers and the trodden middle rooms, minds that cried, "Light, more light!" and minds that said, "We see as it is." ... And over all, the suns so far away they were but glittering points. Hagar's gaze moved across the heavens from host to host. "Ah, if you were hieroglyphics, and we could find the key--"
She came back to the lamplit table; Thomasine away, Mary Magazine asleep--the place was alone with her. She had been tired, but she did not feel so now. She sat down, put her arms above her head and her eyes upon the forest bough, and began to think.... She thought visually with colour and light and form, luminous images parting the mist, rising in the great "interior sphere." She sat there till the clock struck twelve, then she rose, put out the lights, opened every window. In the east, above the roofs, glittered Orion, with Aldebaran red and mighty and the glimmering Pleiades. Hagar stood and gazed. She lifted her eyes toward the zenith--Capella and Algol and the street whose dust is stars between. Her lips moved, she raised her hand. "All hail!" she said; then turning from the window opened the door that led into her bedroom. It was a white and fair and simple place. As she undressed, she was thinking of the October woods at Gilead Balm.
Three days later, at the hotel, Lily and John Fay had a short but momentous conversation. "_Do_ you want to go, John? I don't want you to go if you don't want to go, you know."
"That's what I came to talk to you about," said Fay. "I have my stateroom. The boat sails day after to-morrow. I've written to men I know in London and in Paris. I want to see them. They're men I've worked with. I want to see Robert. I even want to keep on seeing you, Lily! I've been about as eager as a boy for that run over Europe with the two of you. And I don't want to disappoint you and Robert, if it is the least disappointment. But--"