"You showed no astonishment this morning, Miss Carolina, when you saw me among the guests Mr. Howard was bringing to your beautiful house-warming. And as I know the type of your mind, I know that you will ask no questions. Therefore, I owe it to you to tell you, and believe me, I am delighted to include your friends.
"You, Mrs. Winchester, remember meeting me on the train as you were coming from Boston. You thought I had been to take a rest. I had. But it was a rest in a hospital from an operating-table. It was my second operation for cancer of the throat. My inexcusable show of anger at your house, Mrs. Howard, the night I saw the miracle of Miss Carolina’s healing, was induced and aggravated by the knowledge of the ordeal before me and of the futility of it. My brutal words against Mrs. Goddard, this dear, dear woman, whom I have learned to revere and love as my best friend, were uttered because I longed to go and fling myself at her feet and ask her if she could cure me. If any of you men who were there that night--if you, St. Quentin, had knocked me senseless and taken my unconscious body to a Christian Scientist for treatment, I should have thanked you on my knees. But none of you knew.
"Well, I went through this second operation, and it proved as futile as the first had done. Within six months I was confronted by the certainty of the third, and this I felt sure would be fatal.
"With the horrible fear of death before my mental vision, and no faith in surgery, I one day made up my mind to call on Mrs. Goddard, to tell her the ungentlemanly, unmanly words I had used against her in public, to beg her pardon, and if she forgave me, to implore her help for my hideous malady.
"Dear friends, you, who know her, know how she received me. But none of you know that under her treatment I was entirely cured. Nor does she know what I am about to say, for only since I came down here and lived among you and saw your beautiful lives, have I decided. Mrs. Goddard, I owe it to you to tell you first. I have decided to give up the practice of materia medica, which failed me in the hour of my greatest need, and I intend to study to be a Christian Science practitioner."
A startled murmur ran through the group. Even with all their faith, this came as a surprise, for the name of Doctor Colfax stood for so much in the medical world. Few men would have dared to show so much moral courage. Only Mrs. Goddard seemed to understand, for she reached out her hand to him, and he bent and kissed it before them all.