We do not know how clearly the sense of destiny may have been with Mary Baker Patterson in these years. But, conscious or unconscious, it would have made doubly agonizing the “little wrath” that hid God’s face. Many years later she would write, “The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares.” But she would also write, “Physical torture affords but a slight illustration of the pangs which come to one upon whom the world of sense falls with its leaden weight in the endeavor to crush out of a career its divine destiny.”⁴⁵

The Patterson house today stands in a little wilderness. High in the hills, it is almost hidden from the narrow, seldom traveled road that winds past it to North Groton. Through part of the year the roar of a brook fills the tiny hollow in which it stands. Trees and wild shrubs crowd around the patch of grass on its southern side, and the light falls greenly and secretly on the empty house. The windows on the north look straight down to the plunging brook, like windows in a fortress high above a moat, and across to the steep, wooded wall of the ravine.