Yes. As Lewis stepped over the sill into the little old passage to the crooked, beautiful orchard, a kaleidoscope shift took place in his sympathy. And at the same moment the experience of the early morning was upon him again; he had been through all this before. He knew this passage, that orchard, by heart. He knew, too, that grief (he had been wrong in this much of the morning’s prevision: it was grief but never tragedy) was waiting him here at the real Green Doors.

Miss Frazier came through a door halfway down the passage and met them. She said in a lowered voice, “You’ve come! Everything will be all right now. I knew you’d come. Go into the living room, please, and I’ll explain to Teresa. Or Neil, you come with me. You will be better than I. We haven’t told her Neil was bringing you, you see, Doctor.”

“Where’s Petra?” Lewis asked quickly.

“She took a rug and her coat and went up into the orchard to sleep. She took your sedative first. But she wants to know when you come. I promised. She wouldn’t have rested unless. She doesn’t know about the second hemorrhage, or what Father Morris has said. She thinks Teresa is better.”

Lewis went into the living room. And even before his eyes began assembling details, he knew, with a start, that everything was here that he had looked to find this morning in Petra’s bedroom at Green Doors. This was her environment, her sanctuary, her own place in the sun. He felt Petra’s heart beating in this little room, no matter if they said she was up in the orchard, sleeping. The wide old boards of the floor slanted and dipped as the doorsill had slanted and dipped—fluid—one with the flow of life and time. And there, across the room, between two low-silled windows was the birthday present, his own Fra Angelico picture—perfectly hung. So Petra had brought it here, not to Green Doors. But of course. And under the Fra Angelico there were flowers growing in a dish. Fringed, blue gentians. A big, living clump of them. Planted in dark earth. It is impossible to gather them without the roots, Lewis knew, hence the replanting. On the table, beside the gentians, lay a book, open and face down.

Lewis, with an instinct to save any book, no matter what it was, from abuse, crossed the floor; he would find a marker and close the volume kindly. But when he had it in his hand, it defended its owner with dumb sweetness. It was a Modern Library publication, made for easy usage; the only value it set on itself the value of its word,—spirit not flesh. Lewis glanced at the title: “Marius the Epicurean.” Memory stirred. This was the book—wasn’t it?—Petra had claimed to have been reading when she did not come to play tennis with Clare that day Lewis first went to Green Doors! The identical volume. He was sure of it. So Clare had been wrong—as, poor creature, she was ever in peril of being: Petra had been reading “Marius” that afternoon. She had been lying out there in the orchard, near the horizon, side by side with Teresa. They had lain supported by their elbows, turn and turn about, reading “Marius” together. Lewis knew all about that afternoon now, as well as if he had been here himself, in the golden orchard with green doors opening to the sun, sharing “Marius” with them!

And he was glad to know! Then, that June Saturday, he had told himself it was nothing if Petra wanted to impress Clare with reading she had never done. It didn’t matter. It was a trivial schoolgirl variety of deception. But now he knew that it had mattered. He had cared more than a little, deep down in his heart. It had left a mark, a tiny wound, but still tender enough to feel the healing in this moment of discovery.

A paper fluttered from “Marius,” held open and face down in Lewis’ hand. He rescued it from the floor and stood staring. It was his own picture, cut from the rotogravure section of the New York Times,—a photograph of the head that young Italian artist, Ponini, had made when Lewis was in New York last spring, testifying in the Spalding murder case. Ponini had been one of the State’s witnesses. He had introduced himself to Lewis outside the courtroom and persuaded him to sit for him a few times during that tedious week of the trial. Ponini had won surprising acclaim for this particular work, and photographs of the head had been published endlessly, till Lewis was sick of opening magazine or paper and seeing it. But Petra! She had chanced on it, cut it out and preserved it. She must have done this before that Saturday when they met again at Green Doors. This was Petra’s writing, in the narrow white margin. She had written “Marius.”

But this was carrying things beyond strangeness—into truth itself, which cannot be strange or startling! Years ago, in college, Lewis had identified himself with Marius. A peculiarly poignant identification it had been.—Marius, born on the fringes of Christianity but never amalgamated into it. Always wistful, speculative, skeptical. Infinitely skeptical—but passionately searching. Drawn poignantly toward Christians whenever they came into his life. Loving them beyond others with a sure, contented love. Dying finally to save one of them from death. Ministered to in the act of dying by Christians who took it for granted that the martyr to friendship was one of themselves. Marius hungering for Christianity but never attaining communion with it until the instant of his death—and then attaining it by affinity and accident rather than conviction! But how had Petra seen Lewis in all this? How had Petra known!

Lewis replaced the marker in the book, and the book face down, open at the place he had found it, beside the gentians. Thin October late afternoon sunlight slanted through the little, low-ceiled room, casting a transparency over the white, old paneled walls and the wine-colored floorboards. It was a blest light. There was a blessing on this place. And the blessing, for Lewis, suddenly seemed flowing in one direction and coming to form and color in the clump of blue gentians under the Fra Angelico.