"Perhaps he had," she said.
Then Aunt Georgy knew the interview had gone well.
Three days later, not having heard anything more from her, he came to the house late in the afternoon. He was in his own car, and he suggested that perhaps he could help her to overcome her repugnance to motoring. At first she refused with every appearance of terror; but soon she admitted that with him she would feel perfectly safe, and so she yielded and got in.
She spoke little, and he could hear that she drew her breath in a tremulous and disturbing manner. At last, in a lonely road, her terror seemed to overmaster her, and she opened the door and would have sprung out while the car was going thirty-five miles an hour if Lisburn had not held her in.
As soon as he had brought the car to a standstill he took his arm away, while little Evie cowered in the seat beside him.
"You see," she said at last, "how it is with me? If you had not been there I should have jumped out and been killed. It's stronger than I am."
"I see," he answered gently. "Well, if it happens again I won't force you to stay in the car. You shall get out and walk home."
She thanked him warmly for his concession, but it did not happen again.
After this they had conferences every evening, as her stay at Jefferson was coming to an end, and she still did not seem to be able to see what was the emotional center of her dream.
The fact that Lisburn was trying to help little Evie soon began to be known, and the knowledge affected different people differently. Norma said that she should think Evie would be ashamed to take up so much of Mr. Lisburn's time, considering how contemptuous she had been about the whole science of psychoanalysis. The Reverend Mr. Gordon said that he had never been in any doubt that the human spirit needed the confessional, but that only a man in holy orders was fit to receive confession. The mayor was a little more violent. He said that it appeared to him that this fellow was practicing medicine without a license, and that if the law could not reach him it ought to be able to. He hoped it wasn't doing little Miss Evie any harm. Aunt Georgy tried to reassure him, and said Evie seemed in the best of health and spirits, at which the mayor, looking gloomier than ever, said he was much relieved. Aunt Georgy had just been telling this to Evie as she was about to start for her last conference. She was going away the next day.