“Good-bye,” said Cally, “and thank you.”

“Miss Heth,” said Vivian, starting, hurriedly—­“I—­if I—­if it should ever happen that I could help you in any way—­it’s not likely, of course, I understand that—­but if it should ever happen so—­promise me that you’ll send for me.”

But the girl did not make that promise then, her reply being:  “You have helped me—­you must know that....  You’re the one person in the world who has.”

* * * * *

Cally walked home alone, in the dying effects of a lovely afternoon.

She had left the Cooney parlor in the vein of one emerging from strange adventures in undiscovered countries.  This queer feeling would hardly last over the solid threshold of Home, whose atmosphere was almost notoriously uncongenial to eccentricities of that sort.  But it did linger now, as Cally trod somewhat dreamily over streets that she had long known by heart.  Four blocks there were; and the half-lights flickering between sky and sidewalk were of the color of the girl’s own mood.

In this moment she was not troubled with thought, with the drawing of moral lessons concerning duty or otherwise.  Now Mr. V.V.’s unexpected last speeches to her seemed wholly to possess her mind.  She was aware that they had left her curiously humbled....  Strange it seemed, that this man could be so unconscious of the influence he had upon her, had clearly had even last year.  Stranger yet that he, whom only the other day she had thought of as so narrow, so religiously hard, should prove himself absurdly over-generous in his estimate of her....  Or no, not that exactly.  But, at least, it would have been absurd, if it had not been so sweet....

The revolting corner of her mind seemed now to have laid down arms.  Perhaps the girl’s vague thought was that the feelings roused in her in the bunching-room had, after all, been unreasonable, even hysterical, as Hugo had plainly enough stated, as Hen herself had partly argued.  Perhaps it was merely that all that trouble would keep, to be quietly pondered over at a later time.  But rather, it seemed as if a mist had settled down over the regions of practical thought, hiding problems from view.  The Works had somehow been swallowed up in that apologia she had made, Cally Heth’s strange apology to Mr. V.V. for herself and her life.

Cally walked slowly along the familiar street, her thoughts a thousand miles in the blue.  If the words of the good young man had humbled her, they had also mysteriously stirred and uplifted.  She thought of his too trusting tribute, she thought of what they had said about women, their strength and their hope of freedom; and the misty pictures in her mind were not of herself—­for well she had felt her weaknesses this day—­but rather they were of a dim emerging ideal, of herself as she might some day hope to be.  Vague aspirations were moving in her; new reachings of the spirit; dreams that spoke with strange voices....