It was a singular circumstance, but everything in life moves in sequences, and that poor Syrian child upstairs, in her dire extremity, was furnishing a sequence in the young man's life, before she went out of it.

Her stimulation of his sympathy and imagination was to change the whole course of his existence.
Meanwhile, Doctor Sturtevant was having a rather strenuous argument with his wife, who for once stood against him.

She had her not-to-be-silenced personal note.

She had a horror of the alien and unusual.

All her life she had walked her chalk-line, and anything outside savoured of the mysterious, and terrible.