She saw herself cold to her husband, lacking in passionate motherliness to his child, eager for the society of another man not out of love but intellectual vanity, and cavilling also at all religion because faith had no good soil to rest in.

She sat long on the window-sill of the empty room, looking at an uncultivated patch of ground that even in May had no beauty save for here and there the stirring of a weed in the damp scented earth.

She was stunned to see her life limned in such lines, and the truth in the drawing made it at first seem wholly true.
But Fate had another messenger that morning more potent than the prophet.

A girl came by on the road, stopped, looked at her window, and by some impulse such as moved the buds and birds, tripped nearer in the sunshine and offered a flower.

It was a sprig of quince blossom, and the girl stood laughing on the threshold of life just as Susannah had stood when Ephraim first showed her the flower of the quince.