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She met no one in the hotel, and a little later passed under the dingy sign hanging to the mulberry and so along the street in the direction of the Biggers home.

It had been a cloudy day, for purple and slate clouds covered the sky, but far in the west the sun set clear in a long strip of serene yellows and bluish greens. It seemed to Nessie as the cool autumn evening breathed against her face that the western zone of colour and light was the delayed blessing on her prayer. A little courage came to her. The west was of infinite depth and infinite tenderness. It forgave everything; it forgave even that Nessie had loved . . . unpaid and uncontracted for.

Not a person was on the streets. The village was at supper. The village devoted this single moment of the day when all the filth of its streets and all the moral cruelties and pettinesses of its life were forgiven in the solemn absolution of sunset; it devoted that single moment to eating. What cared the village for this pageantry of the west? Of what moment to them this tender forgiving hour; they, who had nothing to be forgiven? Let them eat hot bread in mean rooms beneath lithographs of dead fish, let them talk of the last scandal, or simply eat in silence. That miracle of jade and turquoise fades slowly into the sea-blue depths of night, but what have they to do with that?

Nessie paused at the Biggers's gate and her heart began beating again; but she embattled all her fortitude in her heart. She thought, "I know she will help me; she helps everyone, the weak, the poor, the broken, I know she won't refuse me. . . ."

A swift vision of herself being clasped in the old woman's arms and being allowed to weep out her aching heart flooded Nessie's emotions and softened the desperation of her mood.

The girl opened the sagging gate and entered the yard.