"For goodness' sakes, what a silly baby thing to say!" commented Paul with energy.

Marise called heartily to Mark, "Yes indeed I would, dear."

Paul asked curiously, "Mother, how can you answer him like that, such a fool thing!"

Marise felt another wave of hysterical laughter mounting, at the idea of the difficulty in perceiving the difference in degree of flatness between Mark's remarks and those of Paul.

But it suddenly occurred to her that this was the time for Elly's hour at the piano, and she heard no sound. She hastily laid out the clean clothes for Paul, saw him started on the scrub in the bath-tub, and ran downstairs to see if she could find Elly, before the storm broke, turning over in her mind Elly's favorite nooks.

* * * * *

The air was as heavy as noxious gas in the breathless pause before the arrival of the rain.

In the darkened, shaded hall stood a man's figure, the face turned up towards her, the look on it meant for her, her only, not the useful house-mother, but that living core of her own self, buried, hidden, put off, choked and starved as she had felt it to be, all that morning. That self rose up now, passionately grateful to be recognized, and looked back at him.

Thunder rolled among the distant hills.

She felt her pulse whirling with an excitement that made her lean against the wall, as he took a great stride towards her, crying out, "Oh, make an end . . . make an end of this. . . ."

The door behind him opened, and Elly ran in, red-faced and dusty. "Mother, Mother, Reddy has come off her nest. And there are twelve hatched out of the fourteen eggs! Mother, they are such darlings! I wish you'd come and see. Mother, if I practise good, won't you come afterwards and look at them?"

"You should say 'practise well,' not 'good,'" said Marise, her accent openly ironical.

The wind, precursor of the storm falling suddenly on the valley, shook the trees till they roared.

Over the child's head she exchanged with Vincent Marsh a long reckless look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand, the abandon of which she made no effort to restrain.

With a dry, clattering, immediate rattle, without distance or dignity, the thunder broke threateningly over the house.



CHAPTER XVI

MASSAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS

July 20.

The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense was to keep her self-control in her own room. Of course for her as for any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with people looking on. But for years she had not had to struggle so when alone, for poise and self-mastery. Her room at the Crittendens', which had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter, raw crudity of the Vermont life. She tried to fill the empty hours of Neale's daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious, delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them. A dozen times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into those tasteful slender columns. And every time she looked, she was horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things; the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought, depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling. When she felt her face calm and unlined again, she put on a little massage cream, to make doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Remy de Gourmont, she would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page, that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of sexual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was, with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her personally, were devastatingly more troubling to her facial calm than any most sickening picture in d'Annunzio's portrayal of small-town humanity in which she was trying to take the proper, shocked interest. Despite all her effort to remain tranquil she would guess by the stir of her pulses that probably she had lost control of herself again, and going to the mirror would catch her face all strained and tense in a breathless suspense.

But if there was one thing which life had taught her, it was persevering patience. She drew from the enameled bonbonniere one of the curious, hard sweet-meats from Southern China; lifted to her face the spicy-sweet spikes of the swamp-orchid in her Venetian glass vase; turned her eyes on the reproduction of the Gauguin Ja Orana Maria, and began to draw long, rhythmic breaths, calling on all her senses to come to her rescue. She let her arms and her head and her shoulders go limp again, and fixed her attention on rare and beautiful things of beauty . . . abandoning herself to the pictures called up by a volume of translated Japanese poems she had recently read . . . temples in groves . . . bells in the mist . . . rain on willow-trees . . . snow falling without wind. . . . How delicate and suggestive those poems were! How much finer, more subtle than anything in the Aryan languages!

She came to herself cautiously, glanced at her face in the mirror, and reached for the carved ivory pot of massage cream.

* * * * *

She decided then she would sew a little, instead of reading. The frill of lace in her net dress needed to be changed . . . such a bore having to leave your maid behind. She moved to the small, black-lacquered table where her work-box stood and leaned on it for a moment, watching the dim reflection of her pointed white fingers in the glistening surface of the wood. They did not look like Marise's brown, uncared-for hands. She opened the inlaid box and took from it the thimble which she had bought in Siena, the little antique masterpiece of North Italian gold-work. What a fulfilment of oneself it was to make life beautiful by beautifying all its implements. What a revelation it might be to Neale, how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered to the ugliness of American life.

* * * * *

But none of that, none of that! She was near the danger line again. She felt the flesh on her face begin to grow tense, and with her beautiful, delicate fore-fingers she smoothed her eyebrows into relaxed calm again.

She must keep herself occupied, incessantly; that was the only thing possible. She had been about to have recourse to the old, old tranquillizer of women, the setting of fine stitches. She would fix her mind on that . . . a frill of lace for the net dress . . . which lace? She lifted the cover from the long, satin-covered box and fingered over the laces in it, forcing herself to feel the suitable reaction to their differing physiognomies, to admire the robustness of the Carrick-Macross, the boldness of design of the Argentan, the complicated fineness of the English Point. She decided, as harmonizing best with the temperament of the net dress, on Malines, a strip of this perfect, first-Napoleon Malines. What an aristocratic lace it was, with its cobwebby fond-de-neige background and its fourpetaled flowers in the scrolls. Americans were barbarians indeed that Malines was so little known; in fact hardly recognized at all. Most Americans would probably take this priceless creation in her hand for something bought at a ten-cent store, because of its simplicity and classic reticence of design. They always wanted, as they would say themselves, something more to show for their money. Their only idea of "real lace," as they vulgarly called it (as if anything could be lace that wasn't real), was that showy, awful Brussels, manufactured for exportation, which was sold in those terrible tourists' shops in Belgium, with the sprawling patterns made out of coarse braid and appliqued on, not an organic part of the life of the design.

She stopped her work for a moment to look more closely at the filmy lace in her hand, to note if the mesh of the reseau were circular or hexagonal. She fancied that she was the only American woman of her acquaintance who knew the difference, who had the least culture in the matter of lace . . . except Marise, of course, and it was positively worse for Marise to have been initiated and then turn back to commonness, than for those other well-meaning, Philistine American women who were at least innocently ignorant. Having known the exquisite lore of lace, how could Marise have let it and all the rest of the lore of civilization drop for these coarse occupations of hers, now? How could she have let life coarsen her, as it had, how could she have fallen into such common ways, with her sun-browned hair, and her roughened hands, and her inexactly adjusted dresses, and the fatal middle-aged lines beginning to show from the corner of the ear down into the neck, and not an effort made to stop them. But as to wrinkles, of course a woman as unrestrained as Marise was bound to get them early. She had never learned the ABC of woman's wisdom, the steady cult of self-care, self-beautifying, self-refining. How long would it be before Neale . . .

No! None of that! She must get back to impersonal thoughts. What was it she had selected as subject for consideration? It had been lace. What about lace? Lace . . . ? Her mind balked, openly rebellious. She could not make it think of lace again. She was in a panic, and cast about her for some strong defense . . . oh! just the thing . . . the new hat.

She would try on the new hat which had just come from New York. She had been waiting for a leisurely moment, really to be able to put her attention on that.

She opened the gaily printed round pasteboard box, and took out the creation. She put it on with care, low over her eyebrows, adjusting it carefully by feel, before she looked at herself to get the first impression. Then, hand-glass in hand, she began to study it seriously from various angles. When she was convinced that from every view-point her profile had the unlovely and inharmonious silhouette fashionable that summer, she drew a long breath of relief, and took it off gently, looking at it with pleasure. Nothing gives one such self-confidence, she reflected, as the certainty of having the right sort of hat. How much better "chic" was than beauty!

With the hat still in her hand, her very eyes on it, she saw there before her, as plainly as though in a crystal ball, Marise's attitude as she had stood with Marsh that evening before at the far end of the garden. Her body drawn towards his, the poise of her head, all of her listening intently while he talked . . . one could see how he was dominating her. A man with such a personality as his, regularly hypnotic when he chose, and practised in handling women, he would be able to do anything he liked with an impressionable creature like Marise, who as a girl was always under the influence of something or other. It was evident that he could put any idea he liked into Marise's head just by looking at her hard enough. She had seen him do it . . . helped him do it, for that matter!

And so Neale must have seen. Anybody could! And Neale was not raising a hand, nor so much as lifting an eyebrow, just letting things take their course.

What could that mean except that he would welcome . . .

Oh Heavens! her pulse was hammering again. She sprang up and ran to the mirror. Yes, the mirror showed a face that scared her; haggard and pinched with a fierce desire.

There were not only lines now, there was a hollow in the cheek . . . or was that a shadow? It made her look a thousand years old. Massage would do that no good! And she had no faith in any of those "flesh-foods." Perhaps she was underweight. The hideous strain and suspense of the last weeks had told on her. Perhaps she would better omit those morning exercises for a time, in this intense heat. Perhaps she would better take cream with her oatmeal again. Or perhaps cream of wheat would be better than oatmeal. How ghastly that made her look! But perhaps it was only a shadow. She could not summon courage enough to move and see. Finally she took up her hand-mirror, framed in creamy ivory, with a carved jade bead hanging from it by a green silk cord. She went to the window to get a better light on her face. She examined it, holding her breath; and drew a long, long sigh of respite and relief. It had been only a shadow!

But what a fright it had given her! Her heart was quivering yet. What unending vigilance it took to protect yourself from deep emotions. When it wasn't one, it was another, that sprang on you unawares.

Another one was there, ready to spring also, the suddenly conceived possibility, like an idea thrust into her mind from the outside, that there might be some active part she could play in what was going on in this house. People did sometimes. If some chance for this offered . . . you never could tell when . . . a word might be . . . perhaps something to turn Marise from Neale long enough to . . .

She cast this idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . . like cheap melodrama . . .

She would try the Vedanta deep-breathing exercises this time to quiet herself; and after them, breathing in and out through one nostril, and thinking of the Infinite, as the Yogi had told her.

She lay down flat on the bed for this, kicking off her quilted satin mules, and wriggling her toes loose in their lace-like silk stockings. She would lie on her back, look up at the ceiling, and fix her mind on the movement up and down of her navel in breathing, as the Vedanta priest recommended to quiet the spirit. Perhaps she could even say,

"Om . . . om . . . om . . ."

as they did.

* * * * *

No, no she couldn't. She still had vestiges of that stupid, gross Anglo-Saxon self-consciousness clinging to her. But she would outgrow them, yet.

She lay there quiet and breathed slowly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. And into her mind there slowly slid a cypress-shaded walk with Rome far below on one side, and a sun-ripened, golden, old wall on the other. She stood there with Marise, both so young, so young! And down the path towards them came a tall figure, with a bold clear face, a tender full-lipped mouth, and eyes that both smiled and were steady.

Helplessly she watched him come, groaning in spirit at what she knew would happen; but she could not escape till the ache in her throat swelled and broke, as she saw that his eyes were for Marise and his words, and all of his very self for which she . . .

So many years . . . so many years . . . with so much else in the world . . . not to have been able to cure that one ache . . . and she did not want to suffer . . . she wanted to be at rest, and have what she needed. The tears rose brimming to her eyes, and ran down on each side of her face to the pillow. Poor Eugenia! Poor Eugenia!

* * * * *

She was almost broken this time, but not entirely. There was some fight left in her. She got up from the bed, clenched her hands tightly, and stood in the middle of the floor, gathering herself together.

Down with it! Down! Down! Just now, at this time, when such an utterly unexpected dawn of a possible escape . . . to give way again.

She thought suddenly, "Suppose I give up the New-Thought way, always distracting your attention to something else, always suppressing your desire, resisting the pull you want to yield to. Suppose I try the Freud way, bringing the desire up boldly, letting yourself go, unresisting." It was worth trying.

She sat down in a chair, her elbows on the dressing-table, and let herself go, gorgeously, wholly, epically, as she had been longing to ever since she had first intercepted that magnetic interchange of looks between Marsh and Marise, the day after her arrival, the day of the picnic-supper in that stupid old woman's garden. That was when she had first known that something was up.

* * * * *

Why, how easy it was to let yourself go! They were right, the Freudians, it was the natural thing to do, you did yourself a violence when you refused to. It was like sailing off above the clouds on familiar wings, although it was the first time she had tried them. . . . Marise would fall wholly under Marsh's spell, would run away and be divorced. Neale would never raise a hand against her doing this. Eugenia saw from his aloof attitude that it was nothing to him one way or the other. Any man who cared for his wife would fight for her, of course.

And it was so manifestly the best thing for Marise too, to have a very wealthy man looking out for her, that there could be no disturbing reflexes of regret or remorse for anybody to disturb the perfection of this fore-ordained adjustment to the Infinite. Then with the children away at school for all the year, except a week or two with their father . . . fine, modern, perfect schools, the kind where the children were always out of doors, Florida in winter and New England hills in summer. Those schools were horribly expensive . . . what was all her money for? . . . but they had the best class of wealthy children, carefully selected for their social position, and the teachers were so well paid that of course they did their jobs better than parents.

Then Neale, freed from slavery to those insufferable children, released from the ignoble, grinding narrowness of this petty manufacturing business, free to roam the world as she knew he had always longed to do . . . what a life they could have . . . India with Neale . . . China . . . Paris . . . they would avoid Rome perhaps because of unwelcome memories . . . Norway in summer-time. Think of seeing Neale fishing a Norway salmon brook . . . she and Neale on a steamer together . . . together . . .

She caught sight of her face in the mirror . . . that radiant, smiling, triumphant, young face, hers!

Yes, the Freud way was the best.



CHAPTER XVII

THE SOUL OF NELLY POWERS

July 20.

The big pine was good for one thing, anyhow, if it did keep the house as dark as a cellar with the black shade it made. The side-porch was nice and cool even on a hot summer day, just right for making butter. If it wasn't for the horrid pitch-piny smell the tree wouldn't be so bad. The churning was getting along fine too. The dasher was beginning to go the blob-blob way that showed in a minute or two the butter would be there. It had been a real good idea to get up early and get the work out of the way so that the churning could be done before it got so hot. A thunder-storm was coming, too, probably. You could feel it in the air. There, perhaps the butter had come, now. Nelly pushed the dasher down slowly and drew it back with care, turning her ear to listen expertly to the sound it made. No, not yet, there wasn't that watery splash yet that came after it had separated.

She went on with the regular rhythmic motion, her eyes fixed dreamily on the round hole in the cover of the churn, through which the dasher-handle went up and down and which was now rimmed with thick yellow cream. She loved to churn, Nelly thought. She loved to have milk to look out for, anyhow, from the time it came in from the barn, warm and foamy and sweet-smelling, till the time when she had taken off the thick, sour cream, like shammy-skin, and then poured the loppered milk spatteringly into the pigs' trough. She liked seeing how the pigs loved it, sucking it up, their eyes half shut because it tasted so good. There wasn't anything that was better than giving people or animals what they liked to eat. It made her feel good all over to throw corn to the hens and see how they scrabbled for it. She just loved to get a bag of stick candy at the store, when she went to town, and see how Addie and Ralph and little 'Gene jumped up and down when they saw it.

And then it was so nice to be fore-handed and get the churning out of the way before noon. She would have time this afternoon after the dishes were done, to sit right down with that sprigged calico dress for little Addie. She could get the seams all run up on the machine before supper-time, and have the hand-work, buttonholes and finishing, for pick-up work for odd minutes. She just loved to sit and sew, in a room all nice and picked up, and know the house-work was done.

That would be a real pretty dress, she thought, with the pink sprigs and the pink feather-stitching in mercerized cotton she was going to put on it. Addie would look sweet in it. And if it was washed careful and dried in the shade it wouldn't fade so much. It was a good bright pink to start with. Only Addie ought to have a new hat to wear with it. A white straw with pink flowers on it. But that would cost a couple of dollars, anyhow, everything was so dear now. Oh well, 'Gene would let her buy it. 'Gene would let her do most anything.

She thought with pity of her sisters, mill-hands in West Adams still, or married to mill-hands, men who got drunk on the sly and didn't work regular, and wanted a full half of all they made for themselves. 'Gene and his mother were always scolding about the money they could have had if they'd kept that wood-land on the mountain. They'd ought to ha' been really poor the way she had been, so's you didn't know where the next meal was coming from, or how the rent was going to be paid. She had been awfully lucky to get 'Gene, who let her decide how much money ought to be spent on the children's clothes and hers, and never said a thing, or scolded or bothered. He was kind of funny, 'Gene was, always so sober and solemn, and it was a sort of bother to have him so crazy about her still. That had been all right when they were engaged, and first married. She had liked it all right then, although it always seemed sort of foolish to her. But men were that way! Only now, when there were three children and another one coming, and the house to be kept nice, and the work done up right, and the farmwork and everything going so good, and so much on her mind, why, it seemed as though they'd ought to have other things to think about beside kissings and huggings. Not that 'Gene didn't do his share of the work. He was a fine farmer, as good as anybody in the valley. But he never could settle down, and be comfortable and quiet with her, like it was natural for old married folks to do. If she went by him, close, so her arm touched him, why then, if nobody was there he'd grab at her and kiss her and rumple her hair, and set her all back in her work. With all she had to do and think of, and she did her work as good as anybody if she did say it who shouldn't, she had her day planned before she turned her feet out of bed in the morning. And she liked to have things go the way she planned them. She liked 'Gene all right, only she had her work to get done.

She churned meditatively, looking off towards the mountain where the Eagle Rocks heaved themselves up stiff and straight and high. 'Gene's mother came to the door, asked if the butter was coming all right, looked at her, and said, "My! Nelly, you get better looking every day you live," and went back to her bread-baking.

Nelly went on with her reflections about 'Gene. It was more than just that he bothered her and put her back with her work. She really didn't think it was just exactly nice and refined to be so crazy about anybody as that. Well, there was a streak in the Powerses that wasn't refined. 'Gene's mother! gracious! When she got going, laughing and carrying-on, what wouldn't she say, right out before anybody! And dancing still like a young girl! And that hateful old Mrs. Hewitt, just after they'd moved back to Ashley, didn't she have to go and tell her about 'Gene's being born too soon after his father and mother were married? 'Gene took it from his mother she supposed; he wa'an't to blame, really. But she hoped Addie and Ralph would be like her folks. Not but what the Powerses were good-hearted enough. 'Gene was a good man, if he was queer, and an awful good papa to Addie and Ralph and little 'Gene. None of her sisters had got a man half so good. That sprigged dress would look good with feather-stitching around the hem, too. Why hadn't she thought of that before? She hadn't got enough mercerized thread in the house, she didn't believe, to do it all; and it was such a nuisance to run out of the thread you had to have, and nobody going to the village for goodness knows when, with the farmwork behind the way it was, on account of the rains.

She shifted her position and happened to bring one of her feet into view. Without disturbing a single beat of the regular rhythm of the dasher, she tilted her head to look at it with approbation. If there was one thing she was particular about it was her shoes. She took such comfort in having them nice. They could say what they pleased, folks could, but high heels suited her feet. Maybe some folks, that had great broad feet like that old Indian Toucle, felt better in those awful, sloppy old gunboats they called "Common-sense shoes," but she didn't! It would make her sick to wear them! How they did look! Was there anything so pretty, anyhow, as a fine-leather shoe with a nice pointed toe, and a pretty, curved-in heel? It made you feel refined, and as good as anybody, even if you had on a calico dress with it. That was another nice thing about 'Gene, how he'd stand up for her about wearing the kind of shoes she wanted. Let anybody start to pick on her about it, if 'twas his own mother, he'd shut 'em up short, and say Nelly could wear what she liked he guessed. Even when the doctor had said so strict that she hadn't ought to wear them in the time before the babies came, 'Gene never said a word, when he saw her doing it.

There, the butter was just almost there. She could hear the buttermilk begin to swash! She turned her head to call to her mother-in-law to bring a pitcher for the buttermilk, when a sound of galloping hoofs echoed from the road. Nelly frowned, released her hold on the dasher, listened an instant, and ran into the house. She went right upstairs to her room as provoked as she could be. Well, she would make the bed and do the room-work anyhow, so's not to waste all that time. She'd be that much ahead, anyhow. And as soon as Frank had finished chinning with Mother Powers, and had gone, she'd go back and finish her churning. She felt mad all through at the thought of that cream left at just the wrong minute, just as it was separating. Suppose Frank hung round and hung around, the way he did often, and the sun got higher and the cream got too warm, and she'd have to put in ice, and go down cellar with it, and fuss over it all the rest of the day? She was furious and thumped the pillows hard, with her doubled-up fist. But if she went down, Frank'd hang around worse, and talk so foolish she'd want to slap him. He wa'n't more'n half-witted, sometimes, she thought. What was the matter with men, anyhow? They didn't seem to have as much sense as so many calves! You'd think Frank would think up something better to do than to bother the life out of busy folks, sprawling around all over creation the way he did. But she never had any luck! Before Frank it had been that old Mrs. Hewitt, nosing around to see what she could pick fault with in a person's housekeeping, looking under the sink if you left her alone in the kitchen for a minute, and opening your dresser drawers right before your face and eyes. Well, Frank was getting to be most as much of a nuisance. He didn't peek and snoop the way Mrs. Hewitt did, but he bothered; and he was getting so impudent, too! He had the big-head because he was the best dancer in the valley, that was what was the matter with him, and he knew she liked to dance with him. Well, she did. But she would like to dance with anybody who danced good. If 'Gene didn't clump so with his feet, she'd love to dance with him. And Frank needn't think he was so much either. That city man who was staying with the old man next to the Crittendens was just as good a dancer as Frank, just exactly as light on his feet. She didn't like him a bit. She thought he was just plain fresh, the way he told Frank to go on dancing with her. What was it to him! But she'd dance with him just the same, if she got the chance. How she just loved to dance! Something seemed to get into her, when the music struck up. She hardly knew what she was doing, felt as though she was floating around on that thick, soft moss you walked on when you went blue-berrying on the Burning above the Eagle Rocks . . . all springly. . . . If you could only dance by yourself, without having to bother with partners, that was what would be nice.

She stepped to the door to listen, and heard 'Gene's mother cackling away like an old hen. How she would carry on, with anybody that came along! She hadn't never settled down, not a bit really, for all she had been married and was a widow and was old. It wa'n't nice to be so lively as that, at her age. But she wasn't nice, Mother Powers wasn't, for all she was good to Addie and Ralph and little 'Gene. Nelly liked nice people, she thought, as she went back to shake the rag rugs out of the window; refined ladies like Mrs. Bayweather, the minister's wife. That was the way she wanted to be, and have little Addie grow up. She lingered at the window a moment looking up at the thick dark branches of the big pine. How horrid it was to have that great tree so close to the house! It shaded the bedroom so that there was a musty smell no matter how much it was aired. And the needles dropped down so messy too, and spoiled the grass.

Frank's voice came up the stairs, bold, laughing, "Nelly, Nelly, come down here a minute. I want to ask you something!"

"I can't," she called back. Didn't he have the nerve!

"Why can't you?" the skeptical question came from halfway up the stairs. "I saw you on the side-porch, just as I came up."

Nelly cast about for an excuse. Of course you had to have some reason for saying you couldn't see a neighbor who came in. She had an inspiration. "I'm washing my hair," she called back, taking out the hair-pins hastily, as she spoke. The great coils came tumbling down on her shoulders. She soused them in the water pitcher, and went to the door, opening it a crack, tipping her head forward so that the water streamed on the floor. "Can't you ask Mother Powers for whatever it is?" she said impatiently. She wished as she spoke that she could ever speak right out sharp and scratchy the way other people did. She was too easy, that was the trouble.

"Well," said Frank, astonished, "you be, for a fact."

He went back down the stairs, and Nelly shut the door. She was hot all over with impatience about that butter. When it wasn't one thing to keep her from her work, it was another. Her hair all wet now. And such a job to dry it!

She heard voices in the kitchen, and the screen-door open. Thank goodness, Frank was going away! Oh my! Maybe he was going to the village! He could bring some of the pink mercerized cotton on his way back. He might as well be of some use in the world. She thrust her head out of the window. "Frank, Frank, wait a minute!" she called. She ran back to her work-basket, cut a length from a spool of thread, wound it around a bit of paper, and went again to the window. "Say, Frank, get me two spools of cotton to match that, will you, at Warner and Hardy's."

He rode his horse past the big pine, under her window, and stood up in the stirrups, looking up boldly at her, her hair in thick wet curls about her face. "I'd do anything for you!" he said jokingly, catching at the paper she threw down to him.

She slammed the window down hard. How provoking he was! But anyhow she would have enough thread to feather-stitch that hem. She'd got that much out of him. The thought made up to her for some of the annoyance of the morning. She put a towel around her shoulders under her wet hair, and waited till he was actually out of sight around the bend of the road. It seemed to her that she saw something stir in the long grass in the meadow there. Could the woodchucks be getting so close to the house as that? She'd have to tie Towser up by her lettuce, nights, if they were.

Gracious, there it was thundering, off behind the Rocks! She'd have to hustle, if she got the butter done before the storm came. When Frank had really disappeared, she ran downstairs, and rushed out to her churn. She felt of it anxiously, her face clearing to note that it seemed no warmer than when she had left it. Maybe it was all right still. She began to plunge the dasher up and down. Well, it had gone back some, she could tell by the feel, but not so much, she guessed, but what she could make it come all right.

As she churned, she thought again of Frank Warner. This was the limit! He got so on her nerves, she declared to herself she didn't care if he never danced with her again. She wished she had more spunk, like some girls, and could just send him packing. But she never could think of any sharp things to say to folks, in time. She was too easy, she knew that, always had been. Look how long she had put up with Mrs. Hewitt's snooping around. And then in the end she had got cold feet and had had to sick 'Gene on to her, to tell her they didn't want her sitting around all the time and sponging off them at meal-times.

But somehow she didn't want to ask 'Gene to speak to Frank that way. She was afraid somehow it would get 'Gene excited. Mostly he was so still, and then all of a sudden he'd flare up and she never could see a thing to make him then more than any time. The best thing to do with Gene was to keep him quiet, just as much as she could, not do anything to get him started. That was why she never went close up to him or put her arms around his neck of her own accord. She'd like to pet him and make over him, the way she did over the children, but it always seemed to get him so stirred up and everything. Men were funny, anyhow! She often had thought how nice it would be if 'Gene could only be another woman. They could have such good times together.

Why, here was 'Gene himself come in from cultivating corn right in the middle of the morning. Maybe he wanted a drink. He came up on the porch, without looking at her and went into the house. How heavy he walked. But then he always did. That was the trouble with his dancing. You had to step light, to be a good dancer.

There was a crack of thunder again, nearer than the first one. She heard him ask his mother, "Frank Warner been here?"

And Mother Powers say, "Yes, he come in to ask if we could loan him our compass. He's going to go up tomorrow in the Eagle Rock woods to run out the line between the Warner and the Benson woodlots. The Warners have sold the popple on theirs to the Crittenden mill, and Frank says the blazes are all barked over, they're so old."

Oh goody! thought Nelly, there the butter was, come all at once. The buttermilk was splashing like water. Yes, even there around the hole you could see the little yellow specks. Well, she needn't have got so provoked, after all. That was fine. Now she could get at that sprigged dress for Addie, after all, this afternoon.

'Gene came out on the porch again. She looked at him and smiled. She felt very happy and relieved that the butter had come so that she could finish working it over before noon.

'Gene glowered at her smiling face and at her hair curling and shining all down her back. How cross he looked! Oh bother! Excited too. Well, what could the matter be, now? She should think any man would be satisfied to come in, right in the middle of the morning like that, without any warning, and find his house as spick and span as a pin, and the butter churned and half the day's work out of the way. She'd like to know what more he wanted? Who else could do any better? Oh bother! How queer men were!

Yes, it would really be lots nicer if there were only women and children in the world. Gracious! how that lightning made her jump! The storm had got there quicker'n she'd thought. But the butter had come, so it was all right.



PART III



CHAPTER XVIII

BEFORE THE DAWN

July 21.

Neale had lain so long with his eyes on the place where the window ought to be, that finally he was half persuaded he could see it, a faintly paler square against the black of the room. Very soon dawn would come in that window, and another day would begin.

At the thought the muscles of his forearms contracted, drawing his fingers into rigidly clenched fists, and for a moment he did not breathe.

Then he conquered it again; threw off the worst of the pain that had sprung upon him when he had wakened suddenly, hours before, with the fear at last there before him, visible in the darkness.

What was this like? Where before had he endured this eternity of waiting? Yes, it was in France, the night when they waited for the attack to break, every man haggard with the tension, from dark till just before dawn.

He lay still, feeling Marise's breathing faintly stirring the bed.

There in France it had been a strain almost beyond human power to keep from rushing out of the trenches with bayonets fixed, to meet the threatened danger, to beat it back, to conquer it, or to die and escape the suspense. Now there was the same strain. He had the weapons in his hands, weapons of passion, and indignation and entreaty and reproach, against which Marise would not stand for a moment.

But there in France that would have meant possibly an insignificant local success and the greater victory all along the line imperiled. And here that was true again. There hadn't been anything to do then but wait. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Yes, but it was harder to wait now! There in France they had at least known that finally the suspense would end in the fury of combat. They would have the chance to resist, to conquer, to impose their will. And now there was no active part for him. He must wait on, and hold back his hand from the attack which would give him the appearance of victory, and which would mean everlasting defeat for him, for Marise, the death and ruin of what they had tried to be for each other, to build up out of their life together.

What did he mean by that? Wasn't he fooling himself with words, with priggish phrases? It was so easy to do that. And he was so mortally fatigued with this struggle in the dark. He had been thinking about it so deeply, so desperately, ever since he had faced it there, squarely, those endless black hours ago. He might have lost his way.

Now, once more, slowly, step by step, once more over the terrible road that led him here. Perhaps there was another way he had overlooked. Perhaps this time it would lead him to something less intolerable. Quiet now, steady, all that he had of courage and honesty and knowledge of Marise, and of life, and of himself, put to work.

His brain began again to plod up the treadmill it had labored on for so many black hours. He set himself to get it clear in his own mind, forcing those fierce, burning thoughts of his into words, as if he had been speaking aloud. "Now, now here I am. What must I do? What ought I to do? There must be some answer if I can only think clearly, feel aright. What is it that I want?"

The answer burst from him, as though in a cry of torture from his brain, his body, his passion, his soul, "I want Marise!"

And at this expression of overmastering desire, memory flooded his mind with a stream of unforgotten pictures of their life together; Marise facing him at the breakfast table; Marise walking with him in the autumn woods; Marise with Paul a baby in her arms; Marise, almost unknown then, the flame-like divinity of her soul only guessed-at, looking into his eyes as the Campagna faded into darkness below them. "What was it she asked me then? Whether I knew the way across the dark plain? I was a confident young fool then. I was sure I could find the way, with her. I've been thinking all these years that we were finding it, step by step . . . till now. And now, what is it I am afraid of? I'm afraid she finds herself cramped, wants a fuller existence, regrets . . . no, that's dodging. There's no use lying to myself. I'm afraid that Marise is in love with Vincent Marsh. Good God! no! It can't be that . . . not Marise! This is all nonsense. This is something left over from sleep and a bad dream. I must wake up. I must wake up and find it not true."

He lay perfectly still, his fists clenched tight, perspiration standing out on his rigid body. Then sternly he forced his mind to go forward again, step by step.

"I suppose it's possible. Other women have. There's a lot in her that must be starved here. I may not be enough for her. She was so young then. She has grown so greatly. What right have I to try to hold her if she is tired of it all, needs something else?"

He hesitated, shrinking back as from fire, from the answer he knew he must give. At last he forced it out, "I haven't any right. I don't want her to stay if she wants to go. I want Marise. But even more I want her to be happy."

The thought, with all its implications, terrified him like a death-sentence, but he repeated it grimly, pressing it home fiercely, "I want her to be happy."

He realized where this thought would lead him, and in a panic wildly fought against going on. He had tried to hold himself resolute and steady, but he was nothing now save a flame of resentment. "Happy! She won't be happy that way! She can't love that man! She's being carried away by that damnable sensibility of hers. It would be the most hideous, insane mistake. What am I thinking of . . . all these words! What I must do is to keep her from ruining her life."

On the heels of this outcry, there glided in insinuatingly a soft-spoken crowd of tempting, seductive possibilities. Marise was so sensitive, so impressionable, so easily moved, so defenseless when her emotions were aroused. Hadn't he the right, the duty, he who knew her better than anyone else, to protect her against herself? Wasn't he deceiving himself by fantastic notions? It would be so easy to act the ardent, passionate young lover again . . . but when had he ever "acted" anything for Marise! No matter, no matter, this was life or death; what was a lie when life and death hung in the balance? He could play on her devotion to the children, throw all the weight of his personality, work on her emotions. That was what people did to gain their point. Everybody did it. And he could win if he did. He could hold her.

* * * * *

Like the solemn tolling of a great bell there rang, through all this hurried, despairing clutching at the endurable and lesser, a call to the great and intolerable. The immensity of his love for Marise loomed up, far greater than he; and before that sacred thing he hung his head, and felt his heart breaking.

"No, that won't do. Not when it is Marise who is in question. The best, the very best I can conceive is what I must give to Marise. A cage could not hold her, not anything but her body, and to force her decision would be to make a cage. No, I mustn't use the children either. They are hers as much as mine. If all is not right between us, what would it avail them to be with us? They must take what life brings them, like the rest of us. If the years Marise and I have passed together, if what we have been to each other, and are to each other, if that is not enough, then nothing is enough. That would be a trick to play on her . . . to use my knowledge of her vulnerable points to win. That is not what I want. What do I want? I want Marise to be happy."

He had advanced a step since the last time he had told himself this, for now he said it with a dreadful calm, his heart aching but not faltering.

But he could go no further. There were limits to what he could endure. He fell into a trance-like state of passivity, his body and mind exhausted.

As he lay thus, fallen and prostrate, there soared up out of a part of him that was neither mind nor body, but was nevertheless himself, something swift and beautiful and living, something great enough at last to measure its greatness with the immensity of his love for Marise.

What was it?

It was this . . . for a moment he had it all clear, as though he had died and it were something told him in another world . . . he did not want Marise for himself; he did not even want her to be happy; he wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature so far as any human being could do this in this life.

And to do that she must be free.

For an instant he looked full at this, his heart flooded with glory. And then the light went out.

He was there in the blackness again, unhappy beyond any suffering he had thought he could bear.

He lay still, feeling Marise beside him, the slow, quiet rhythm of her breathing. Was she awake or sleeping? What would happen if he should allow the fear and suffering which racked him to become articulate? If he should cry out to her, she would not turn away. He knew Marise. She would never turn away from fear and suffering. "But I can't do that. I won't work on her sympathy. I've promised to be true to what's deepest and truest in us both. I have been, by God! and I will be. If our married life has been worth anything, it's because we've both been free and honest . . . true with one another. This is her ordeal. She must act for herself. Better die than use my strength to force her against her own nature. If I decide . . . no matter how sure I am I'm right . . . it won't be her decision. Nothing would be decided. I must go on just as before . . ." he groaned, "that will take all the strength I have."

It was clear to him now; the only endurable future for them, such as they were to each other, would come from Marise's acting with her own strength on her own decision. By all that was sacred, he would never by word or act hamper that decision. He would be himself, honestly. Marise ought to know what that self was.

He had thought that this resolve would bring to him another of these terrible racking instants of anguish, but instead there came almost a calm upon him, as though the pain had passed and left him in peace, or as though a quiet light had shone out in the darkness. Perhaps the dawn had come. No, the square of the window was still only faintly felt in the blacker mass of the silent room.

Then he knew why the pain had left him. It had been driven away by the certainty that there was a worse fear than any he knew, or ever would know. No matter what risk or catastrophe lay before them, Marise would never look at him out her clear eyes and act a thing that was not true. Marise would always be Marise. Why then, whatever came he could bear it.

Life might be cruel and pitiless, but it was not base, when it had among its gifts such a certainty as that, rock-like under his feet, bearing him up in his pain.

He moved to her in the bed, felt for her hand and put it gently to his lips.

Then, holding it in his, on his breast, he turned his eyes towards the window, waiting for the dawn.



CHAPTER XIX

MR. WELLES LIGHTS THE FUSE

July 2.

That early morning talk with Mr. Welles had left Marise trembling with helpless sorrow and exasperation. She sat on the bench where he had left her, and felt the nervous tears stinging her eyes. When she looked up and saw Vincent Marsh was standing there, extremely pale, as visibly shaken as she, as visibly little in control of himself, she burst out, "So you too know. He has just told me that he is really going. The very date is set. His cousin has a room in her boarding house engaged for him. He's going to work as a clerk to pay for the extra expenses of the life there. Oh!" She struck her hand on the back of the bench.

Vincent Marsh sat down beside her, his eyes on hers. He said in a curious, low voice, rough and husky, "I wish you would do something for me. I wish you would think with all your might, deeply, just why you are so opposed to his doing what evidently seems to him a very saintly and heroic action; and then tell me why it is."

Marise felt this as a challenge. He was always challenging everything. This time she was more than ready. "I don't need any time to think of reasons!" she cried. "It's obvious to anyone with any sense for the reality of human values, who isn't fooled by threadbare old words. It's one of those wasteful, futile, exasperating tricks people play on themselves in the name of 'duty.' He's throwing away something real and true, something that could add to the richness of human life, he's throwing away the happiness that comes of living as suits his nature, and so creating a harmony that enriches everybody who touches him. And what's he doing it for? To satisfy a morbid need for self-sacrifice. He's going to do harm, in all probability, mix up a situation already complicated beyond solution, and why is he? So that he can indulge himself in the perverse pleasure of the rasp of a hair-shirt. He doesn't really use his intelligence to think, to keep a true sense of proportions; he takes an outworn and false old ideal of self-sacrifice, and uses it not to do anybody any real good, but to put a martyr's crown on his head."

She became conscious that her words were having a singular effect upon Vincent. A dark flush had come over all his face. His gaze on her was extraordinary in its intentness, in its eagerness, in its fierceness. She stopped suddenly, as though he had broken in on what she was saying.

He did not stir from his place, but to her he seemed to tower taller. Into his dark, intent face came an exultant look of power and authority which fell on her like a hot wind. With a loud knocking of her heart she knew. Before he spoke, she knew what he would say. And he saw that.

He opened those burning lips and said in the same low voice, rough with its intensity, "You see what you have done. You have spoken for me. You have said at last what I have been silently and desperately calling out to you. You know what has happened. You have said it, it is obvious to anyone with any sense of human values. Make an end! Make an end! Come away from a position where only an outworn old ideal holds you to futility and waste. Come away where you will really live and know the fullness of life. Come away from that false notion of duty which makes you do for the children what you know is not best for them, only because it is the traditional thing to do, only because it gives you a martyr's crown to wear. I don't say anything now, as I would to any other woman in the world, as I would have said to you weeks ago before I knew all that you are . . . I don't say anything about the imbecility of keeping such a woman as you are here in this narrow, drab hole, this sordid prison . . . you born, if ever a human being was, to rich and warm and harmonious living! It is your birthright. Let me give it to you. All that, even that, a whole world of beauty and fullness waiting for you to create it to glorious being, all that is nothing compared to what has come to pass between us, you and me; compared to that other world of impassioned living existence that is waiting for you. Come away from the man who is nothing more to you than the house you live in . . . nothing but a habit."

She started at this, moving out of the stony immobility in which she gazed at him, listened to him. She did not know that she had moved, was incapable of willing to do so. It had been a mere reflex start as though she had been struck. But at the sight of it, the flame in his eyes leaped up. "No, no, no!" he cried with an insistent triumph, "he is nothing more to you than a habit. And you are nothing more to him. You were right, on that evening when you shrank away from the sight of the place in Italy where in your ignorant youth you made the mistake of trying to join your life to his. There is not a breath you draw, not a turn of your head or body . . . I know them all . . . that does not prove that he is nothing to you now. I have seen you take a handkerchief from his pocket as you would take it from a bureau-drawer. I have seen him set you on one side, to pass through a door, as he would set a chair on one side. You don't even see him any more when you look at him, and he doesn't see you. Whatever there may have been between you, if there was ever anything real, it is dead now, dead and buried . . . and you the most living woman who ever wore flesh and blood! And I am a living man! You know, I don't need to say it, you know what happens when our looks meet. Our looks only! Life flares up like a torch in both of us. You know if I but brush against your skirt, how I cannot speak! You know how when our hands touch, every drop of blood in our two bodies burns! You are a grown woman. You know life as well as I do. You know what this means. You are no longer even a part of his life. You are all of mine. Look at me now."

He flung out his hands, shaking uncontrollably. "Do you see how I show this, say this anywhere, tell this to you here, now, where anyone could hear me? I am not ashamed of it. It is not a thing to hide. It is a thing to glory in. It is the only honestly living thing in all our miserable human life, the passion of a man and a woman for each other. It is the only thing that moves us out of our cowardly lethargy of dead-and-alive egotism. The thing that is really base and false is to pretend that what is dead is still alive. Your marriage is dead. Your children do not need you as you pretend. Let yourself go in this flood that is sweeping us along. I had never thought to know it. I could fall down and worship you because you have shown it to me. But I will show it to you, that and the significance of what you will be when you are no longer smothered and starved. In all this scrawling ant-heap of humanity, there are only a handful of human beings who ever really live. And we will be among them. All the rest are nothing, less than nothing, to be stamped down if they impede you. They have no other destiny. But we have! Everything comes down to that in the end. That is the only truth. That . . . and you and I!"

In the distance, someone called Marise's name. He thought she made a move, and said, leaning towards her, the heat of his body burning through to her arm where he touched her, "No, no, none of those trivial, foolish interruptions that tie you hand and foot, can tie us any longer. They have no real strength. They can't stand for an instant against something alive. All that rattles in your ears, that keeps you from knowing what you really are . . ."

Someone was hurrying down the walk towards them, hidden by the hedge. Marise could not have turned her head if her life had hung on the action.

Vincent looked straight at her, straight and deep and strong into her eyes, and for an instant his burning lips were pressed on hers. The contact was terrible, momentous.

When he went on speaking, without haste, unafraid although the hurrying steps were almost there, she could scarcely hear his voice, although it was urgent and puissant as the impact of his eyes. "You can't get away from this now. It is here. It has been said. It lives between us, and you are not strong enough, no power on earth is strong enough, to put it down."

* * * * *

And then the outer world broke in on them, swept between them with an outcry. Someone was there, someone who drew short sobbing breaths, who caught at her and clung to her. It was Cousin Hetty's old Agnes . . . why in the world was she here? . . . and she was saying in a loud voice as though she had no control of it, "Oh, oh! Come quick! Come quick!"

Marise stood up, carrying the old woman with her. She was entirely certain now that she was in a nightmare, from which she would presently awake, wet with cold sweat.

"Come! Come!" cried the old woman, beating her hands on Marise's arm. "Perhaps it ain't too late. Perhaps you can do something."

"What has happened?" asked Marise, making her voice sharp and imperative to pierce the other's agitation.

"I don't know. I don't know," sobbed Agnes. "She didn't come down for breakfast. I went up to see . . . oh, go quick! Go quick!"

She went down, half on the bench, half on the ground.

Marise and Marsh stood for an instant, petrified.

There was only the smallest part of Marise's consciousness which was alive to this. Most of it lay numbed and bewildered, still hearing, like a roll of thunder, the voice of Vincent Marsh.

Then she turned. "Look out for her, will you," she said briefly. "No, don't come with me. I'll go by the back road. It's the quickest, but it's too narrow for a car. You drive to Ashley and bring the doctor in your car."

She ran down the path and around the house to the road, not feeling the blinding heat of the sun. She ran along the dusty road, a few steps from the house before the turn into the narrow lane. She felt nothing at all but a great need for haste.

As she ran, putting all her strength into her running, there were moments when she forgot why she was hurrying, where she was going, what had happened; but she did not slacken her pace. She was on the narrow back road now, in the dense shade of the pines below the Eagle Rocks. In five minutes she would be at Cousin Hetty's. That was where she was going.

She was running more slowly now over the rough, uneven, stony road, and she was aware, more than of anything else, of a pain in her chest where she could not draw a long breath. It seemed to her that she must be now wholly in the bad dream, for she had the nightmare sensation of running with all her strength and not advancing at all. The somber, thick-set pines seemed to be implacably in the same place, no matter how she tried to pass them, to leave them behind, to hurry on. Everything else in the silent, breathless, midsummer forest was rooted immovably deep in the earth. She alone was killing herself with haste, and yet futilely . . . not able to get forward, not able to . . .

* * * * *

And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and showed her another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right, running down the steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks. A man running as she had been wishing she could run, a powerful, roughly dressed man, rapt in a passion of headlong flight, that cast him down the rough slope, over the rocks, through the brambles, as though his flight were part of an endless fall.

Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but the age-old woman's instinct of fear and concealment.

The man plunged forward, not seeing her where she stood on the road across which he now burst, flinging himself out of the pines on one side and into the thicket of undergrowth on the other.

Far from him as she was, Marise could hear, through the forest hush, the terrible sound of his breathing as he ran, as he stumbled, as he struggled to his feet, fighting crazily with the thick undergrowth. Those loud hoarse gasps . . . it was as though he were being choked to death by a hand on his throat.

He was gone, down the slope towards the valley road. The leaves closed together behind him. The forest was impenetrably silent again. Marise knew who he was, then, recognized him for 'Gene Powers beyond any doubt.

She felt a strange mixture of pity and scorn and envy. To be so primitive as that . . . to think, even for an instant's madness, that you could run away on your own two poor human feet from whatever life brought to you!

* * * * *

She herself was hurrying forward again. What was she going to? What had she left behind? The passage of the other runner had not taken a single moment's time. She was now at the path which led to Cousin Hetty's side-door.

She darted along this, and found herself in the yard before the door, open as Agnes had left it when she rushed out for help.

A tea-kettle on the kitchen-stove sang in a low murmur. The clock ticked loudly, wagging its pendulum back and forth. The cat, stretched at full length on the floor in a yellow square of sunlight, lifted a drowsy head and looked at her. There was a smell of freshly made coffee in the air. As she stood there for an instant till the whirling in her head should stop, a stick of wood in the fire broke and fell together.

Marise went through into the dining-room where the table laid for breakfast stood in a quiet expectancy. The old house, well-kept and well-loved, wore a tranquil expression of permanence and security.

But out in the dusky hail, the white stairs stood palely motioning up. There Marise felt a singular heavy coolness in the stagnant air. She went up the stairs, leaning on the balustrade, and found herself facing an open door.

Beyond it, in a shuttered and shaded room, stood a still white bed. And on the bed, still and white and distant, lay something dead. It was not Cousin Hetty. That austere, cold face, proud and stern, was not Cousin Hetty's. It was her grandmother's, her father's, her uncle's face, whom Cousin Hetty had never at all resembled. It was the family shell which Cousin Hetty had for a time inhabited.

Marise came forward and crossed the threshold. Immediately she was aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. The room was densely filled with silence, which folded her about coldly. She sank down on a chair. She sat motionless, looking at what lay there so quiet, at the unimaginable emptiness and remoteness of that human countenance.

This was the end. She had come to the end of her running and her haste and her effort to help. All the paltry agitations and sorrows, the strains and defeats and poor joys, they were all hurrying forward to meet this end.

All the scruples, and sacrifices, and tearing asunder of human desires to make them fit words that were called ideals, all amounted to this same nothingness in the end.

What was Cousin Hetty's life now, with its tiny inhibitions, its little passivities? The same nothingness it would have been, had she grasped boldly at life's realities and taken whatever she wanted.

And all Cousin Hetty's mother's sacrifices for her, her mother's hopes for her, the slow transfusion of her mother's life to hers; that was all dead now, had been of no avail against this nothingness. Some day Elly would lie like that, and all that she had done for Elly, or could do for her, would be only a pinch of ashes. If she, if Cousin Hetty, if Cousin Hetty's mother, if Elly, if all of them, took hotly whatever the hours had to give, they could not more certainly be brought to nothingness and oblivion in the end. . . .

Those dreams of her . . . being one with a great current, sweeping forward . . . what pitiful delusions! . . . There was nothing that swept forward. There were only futile storms of froth and excitement that whirled you about to no end, one after another. One died down and left you becalmed and stagnant, and another rose. And that would die down in its turn. Until at the end, shipwreck, and a sinking to this darkly silent abyss.



CHAPTER XX

A PRIMAEVAL HERITAGE

July 21. Evening.

Cousin Hetty lay coldly dead; and Marise felt herself blown upon by an icy breath that froze her numb. The doctor had come and gone, queerly, and bustlingly alive and full of talk and explanations; Agnes had come back and, silently weeping, had walked endlessly and aimlessly around the house, with a broom in her idle hand; one after another of the neighbors had come and gone, queerly alive as usual, they too, for all their hushed and awkward manners; Neale had come, seeming to feel that cold breath as little as the others.

And now Neale was gone, after everything had been decided, all the incredibly multitudinous details that must be decided. The funeral was set for the day after tomorrow, and until then, everything in everybody's life was to stop stock-still, as a matter of course. Because Agnes was in terror of being left alone for an instant, Marise would not even leave the house until after the funeral, and one of the thousand petty unescapable details she and Neale had talked of in the hushed voice which the house imposed on all in it, was the decision as to which dress and hat were to be sent to her from the wardrobe at home.

She was to stay there with Agnes, she, who was all the family old Cousin Hetty had left, for the last watch over what lay up there on the bed in her bedroom. Neale would look out for the children (there was no one else for the moment, Toucle was gone, Eugenia quite useless), would telegraph the few old friends who would care to know the news, would see Mr. Bayweather about the funeral, would telephone the man in West Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs waiting in case the undertaker needed something.

She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr. Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure himself, hushed and stilled by his association with everlasting stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent. A strange life he must have had. She had never thought of it till she had seen him come into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed, not knowing what to do. Into how many such houses he must have gone, with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody knew was coming sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all. How extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old as she was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up. That threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it always comes as a shock," that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would happen to you.

This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person disappeared for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself now, the little girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put her back in the path. She had a moment of very simple, sweet sorrow, sitting there alone in the hall, warm tears streaming down her cheeks and falling on her hands. Cousin Hetty gone, dear old Cousin Hetty, with her bright living eyes, and her love for all that was young. How much she owed her . . . those troubled years of her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house were unfailing shelter. What shelter had she now?

The pendulum of her mind swung back . . . of course this was silly traditional repeating of superstitious old words. There was no shelter; there could be none in this life. No one could show her the path, because there was no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was only a charlatan who traded on moments of weakness like this.

Mr. Hadley opened the door quietly and asked in that seldom-heard voice of his for a couple of soft, clean towels. Where did Cousin Hetty keep her towels? In the chest of drawers at the end of the hall. An odor of cloves came up spicily into the air as Marise opened the drawer. How like Cousin Hetty to have that instead of the faded, sentimental lavender. She had perhaps put those towels away there last night, with her busy, shaking old hands, so still now. All dead, the quaintness, the vitality, the zest in life, the new love for little Elly, all dead now, as though it had never been, availing nothing. There was nothing that did not die.

She handed in the towels and sat down again on the stairs leaning her head against the wall. What time could it be? Was it still daylight? . . . No, there was a lamp lighted down there. What could she have been doing all day, she and Agnes and the doctor and Mr. Hadley? She wondered if the children were all right, and if Neale would remember, when he washed Mark's face, that there was a bruise on his temple where the swing-board had struck him. Was that only yesterday morning! Was it possible that it was only last night that she had lain awake in the darkness, trying to think, trying to know what she was feeling, burning with excitement, as one by one those boldly forward-thrusting movements came back to her from the time when he had cried out so angrily, "They can't love her. They're not capable of it!" to the time when they had exchanged that long reckless gaze over Elly's head! And now there was the triumphant glory of security which had been in his kiss . . . why, that was this morning, only a few hours ago! Even through her cold numbed lassitude she shrank again before the flare-up of that excitement, and burned in it. She tried to put this behind her at once, to wait, like all the rest, till this truce should be over, and she should once more be back in that melee of agitation the thought of which turned her sick with confusion. She was not strong enough for life, if this was what it brought, these fierce, clawing passions that did not wait for your bidding to go or come, but left you as though you were dead and then pounced on you like tigers. She had not iron in her either to live ruthlessly, or to stamp out that upward leap of flame which meant the renewal of priceless youth and passion. Between these alternatives, she could make no decision, she could not, it would tear her in pieces to do it.

The pendulum swung back again, and all this went out, leaving her mortally tired. Agnes came to the foot of the stairs, a little, withered, stricken old figure, her apron at her eyes. From behind it she murmured humbly, between swallowing hard, that she had made some tea and there was bread and butter ready, and should she boil an egg?

A good and healing pity came into Marise's heart. Poor old Agnes, it was the end of the world for her, of course. And how touching, how tragic, how unjust, the fate of dependents, to turn from one source of commands to another. She ran downstairs on tip-toe and put her arm around the old woman's shoulder. "I haven't said anything yet, Agnes," she told her, "because this has come on us so suddenly. But of course Mr. Crittenden and I will always look out for you. Cousin Hetty . . . you were her best friend."

The old woman laid her head down on the other's shoulder and wept aloud. "I miss her so. I miss her so," she said over and over.

"The thing to do for her," thought Marise, as she patted the thin heaving shoulders, "is to give her something to work at." Aloud she said, "Agnes, we must get the front room downstairs ready. Mr. Hadley wants to have Cousin Hetty brought down there. Before we eat we might as well get the larger pieces of furniture moved out."

Agnes stood up, docilely submitting herself to the command, stopped crying, and went with Marise into the dim old room, in which nothing had been changed since the day, twenty years ago, when the furniture had been put back in place after Cousin Hetty's old mother had lain there, for the last time.

The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was herself again, stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity of being once more under the direction of another. They pulled out the long haircloth sofa, moved the spindle-legged old chairs into the dining-room, and carried out one by one the drawers from the high-boy in the corner. From one of these drawers a yellowed paper fell out. Marise picked it up and glanced at it. It was a letter dated 1851, the blank page of which had been used for a game of Consequences. The foolish incoherencies lay there in the faded ink just as they had been read out, bringing with them the laughter of those people, so long dead now, who had written them down in that pointed, old-fashioned handwriting. Marise stood looking at it while Agnes swept the other room. Cousin Hetty had been ten years old in 1851, just as old as Paul was now. Her mother had probably left something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her little daughter over this trivial game. A ghostly echo of that long-silent laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear. So soon gone. Was it worth while to do it at all? Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those children one tried to keep laughing, and then . . .

Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing. People had been coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as though death had made it their own home. Agnes came to the door, Marise looked up and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the second time she had been there. "I come over again," she said, "to bring you some hot biscuit and honey. I knew you wouldn't feel to do much cooking." She added, "I put the biscuits in the oven as I come through, so they'd keep warm."

"Oh, thank you, Nelly, that's very kind and thoughtful," said Marise. As she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman standing there, the richness of her vitality vibrating about her, she saw again the nightmare vision of 'Gene and heard the terrible breathing that had resounded in the Eagle Rock woods. She was overwhelmed, as so often before in her life, by an amazement at the astounding difference between the aspect of things and what they really were. She had never entirely outgrown the wildness of surprise which this always brought to her. She and Nelly, looking at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot biscuits!

She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech in a play to Agnes' conscientious country attempt to make conversation with the caller, "Hot today, ain't it? Yesterday's storm didn't seem to do much good." And to Nelly's answer on the same note, "Yes, but it's good for the corn to have it hot. 'Gene's been out cultivating his, all day long."

"Ah, not all day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to herself. She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to escape the unescapable.

An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. There was a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife; passionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence had not chilled down to . . ."

"Well, I guess I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of the valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound. . . . As though a sound could reach Cousin Hetty now!

"I don't like her biscuits," said Agnes. "She always puts too much sody in." She added, in what was evidently the expression of an old dislike, "And don't she look a fool, a great hulking critter like her, wearing such shoes, teeterin' along on them heels."

"Oh well," said Marise, vaguely, "it's her idea of how to look pretty."

"They must cost an awful sight too," Agnes went on, scoldingly, "laced halfway up her leg that way. And the Powerses as poor as Job's turkey. The money she puts into them shoes'd do 'em enough sight more good if 'twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I call it."

She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door and walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious, lugubrious tip-toe step of the day. It was Mr. Bayweather, his round old face rather pale. "I'm shocked, unutterably shocked by this news," he said, and indeed he looked badly shaken and scared. It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had been of about his age. He shook her hand and looked about for a chair. "I came to see about which hymns you would like sung," he said. "Do you know if Miss Hetty had any favorites?" He broke off to say, "Mrs. Bayweather wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with me tonight to see if there was anything she could do. But she was stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house. Frank, it seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines in the woods somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to lunch. He didn't come then and hasn't showed up at all yet. Mrs. Warner wanted my wife to telephone up to North Ashley to see if he had perhaps gone there to spend the night with his aunt. The line was busy of course, and Mrs. Bayweather was still trying to get them on the wire when I had to come away. If she had no special favorites, I think that 'Lead, Kindly Light, Amid th' Encircling Gloom' is always suitable, don't you?"

Something seemed to explode inside Marise's mind, and like a resultant black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility loomed up, so darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to answer the clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran through the Eagle Rock woods!

* * * * *

"Or would you think an Easter one, like 'The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Won,' more appropriate?" suggested Mr. Bayweather to her silence.

* * * * *

Agnes started. "Who's that come bursting into the kitchen?" she cried, turning towards the door.

It seemed to Marise, afterwards, that she had known at that moment who had come and what the tidings were.

Agnes started towards the door to open it. But it was flung open abruptly from the outside. Toucle stood there, her hat gone from her head, her rusty black clothes torn and disarranged.

Marise knew what she was about to announce.

She cried out to them, "Frank Warner has fallen off the Eagle Rocks. I found him there, at the bottom, half an hour ago, dead."

* * * * *

The savage old flame, centuries and ages older than she, flared for an instant high and smoky in Marise's heart. "There is a man who knows how to fight for his wife and keep her!" she thought fiercely.



CHAPTER XXI

THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS

July 21. Night.

It had been arranged that for the two nights before the funeral Agnes was to sleep in the front bedroom, on one side of Cousin Hetty's room, and Marise in the small hall bedroom on the other side, the same room and the same bed in which she had slept as a little girl. Nothing had been changed there, since those days. The same heavy white pitcher and basin stood in the old wash-stand with the sunken top and hinged cover; the same oval white soap-dish, the same ornamental spatter-work frame in dark walnut hung over the narrow walnut bedstead.

As she undressed in the space between the bed and the wash-stand, the past came up before her in a sudden splashing wave of recollection which for a moment engulfed her. It had all been a dream, all that had happened since then, and she was again eight years old, with nothing in the world but bad dreams to fear, and Cousin Hetty there at hand as a refuge even against bad dreams. How many times she had wakened, terrified, her heart beating hammer-strokes against her ribs, and trotted shivering, in her night-gown, into Cousin Hetty's room.

"Cousin Hetty! Cousin Hetty!"

"What? What's that? Oh, you, Marise. What's the matter? Notions again?"

"Oh, Cousin Hetty, it was an awful dream this time. Can't I get into bed with you?"

"Why yes, come along, you silly child."

The fumbling approach to the bed, the sheets held open, the kind old hand outstretched, and then the haven . . . her head on the same pillow with that of the brave old woman who was afraid of nothing, who drew her up close and safe and with comforting assurance instantly fell asleep again. And then the delicious, slow fading of the terrors before the obliterating hand of sleep, the delicious slow sinking into forgetfulness of everything.

* * * * *

Standing there, clad in the splendor of her physical maturity, Marise shivered uncontrollably again, and quaked and feared. It was all a bad dream, all of it, and now as then Cousin Hetty lay safe and quiet, wrapped in sleep which was the only escape. Marise turned sick with longing to go again, now, to seek out Cousin Hetty and to lie down by her to share that safe and cold and dreamless quiet.

She flung back over her shoulder the long shining dark braid which her fingers had been automatically twisting, and stood for a moment motionless. She was suffering acutely, but the pain came from a source so deep, so confused, so inarticulate, that she could not name it, could not bring to bear on it any of the resources of her intelligence and will. She could only bend under it as under a crushing burden, and suffer as an animal endures pain, dumbly, stupidly.

After a time a small knock sounded, and Agnes's voice asked through the door if Miss Marise thought the door to . . . to . . . if the "other" door ought to be open or shut. It was shut now. What did people do as a general thing?

Marise opened her own door and looked down on the old figure in the straight, yellowed night-gown, the knotted, big-veined hand shielding the candle from the wandering summer breeze which blew an occasional silent, fragrant breath in from the open windows.

"I don't know what people do as a rule," she answered, and then asked, "How did Miss Hetty like best to have it, herself?"

"Oh, open, always."

"We'd better open it, then."

The old servant swayed before the closed door, the candlestick shaking in her hand. She looked up at Marise timidly. "You do it," she said under her breath.

Marise felt a faint pitying scorn, stepped past Agnes, lifted the latch, and opened the door wide into the blackness of the other room.

The dense silence seemed to come out, coldly and softly. For Marise it had the sweetness of a longed-for anaesthetic, it had the very odor of the dreamless quiet into which she longed to sink. But Agnes shrank away, drew hastily closer to Marise, and whispered in a sudden panic, "Oh, don't it scare you? Aren't you afraid to be here all alone, just you and me? We'd ought to have had a man stay too."

Marise tried to answer simply and kindly, "No, I'm not afraid. It is only all that is left of dear Cousin Hetty." But the impatience and contemptuous surprise which she kept out of her words and voice were felt none the less by the old woman. She drooped submissively as under a reproach. "I know it's foolish," she murmured, "I know it's foolish."

She began again to weep, the tears filling her faded eyes and running quietly down her wrinkled old cheeks. "You don't know how gone I feel without her!" she mourned. "I'd always had her to tell me what to do. Thirty-five years now, every day, she's been here to tell me what to do. I can't make it seem true, that it's her lying in there. Seems as though every minute she'd come in, stepping quick, the way she did. And I fairly open my mouth to ask her, 'Now Miss Hetty, what shall I do next?' and then it all comes over me."

Marise's impatience and scorn were flooded by an immense sympathy. What a pitiable thing a dependent is! Poor old Agnes! She leaned down to the humble, docile old face, and put her cheek against it. "I'll do my best to take Cousin Hetty's place for you," she said gently, and then, "Now you'd better go back to bed. There's a hard day ahead of us."

Agnes responded with relief to the tone of authority. She said with a reassured accent, "Well, it's all right if you're not afraid," turned and shuffled down the hall, comforted and obedient.

Marise saw her go into her room, heard the creak of the bed as she lay down on it, and then the old voice, "Miss Marise, will it be all right if I leave my candle burning, just this once?"

"Yes, yes, Agnes, that'll be all right," she answered. "Go to sleep now." As she went back into her own room, she thought passingly to herself, "Strange that anyone can live so long and grow up so little."

She herself opened her bed, lay down on it resolutely, and blew out her candle.

Instantly the room seemed suffocatingly full of a thousand flying, disconnected pictures. The talk with Agnes had changed her mood. The dull, leaden weight of that numbing burden of inarticulate pain was broken into innumerable fragments. For a time, before she could collect herself to self-control, her thoughts whirled and roared in her head like a machine disconnected from its work, racing furiously till it threatens to shake itself to pieces. Everything seemed to come at once.

Frank Warner was dead. What would that mean to Nelly Powers?

Had there been enough bread left in the house till someone could drive the Ford to Ashley and buy some more?

Ought she to wear mourning for Cousin Hetty?

What had happened on the Eagle Rocks? Had Frank and 'Gene quarreled, or had 'Gene crept up behind Frank as he sighted along the compass?

How would they get Cousin Hetty's friends from the station at Ashley, out to the house, such feeble old people as they were? It would be better to have the services all at the church.

Had anything been decided about hymns? Someone had said something about it, but what had she . . . oh, of course that had been the moment when Toucle had come in, and Mr. Bayweather had rushed away to tell Frank's mother. Frank's mother. His mother! Suppose that were to happen to Mark, or Paul? No, not such thoughts. They mustn't be let in at all, or you went mad.

Was it true that Elly cared nothing about her, that children didn't, for grown-ups, that she was nothing in Elly's life?

She was glad that Toucle had come back. There would be someone to help Neale with the children. . . .

Neale . . . the name brought her up abruptly. Her mind, hurrying, breathless, panting, was stopped by the name, as by a great rock in the path. There was an instant of blankness, as she faced it, as though it were a name she did not know. When she said that name, everything stopped going around in her head. She moved restlessly in her bed.

And then, as though she had gone around the rock, the rapid, pattering, painful rush of those incoherent ideas began again. Queer that nobody there, Mr. Bayweather, Agnes, Toucle, none of them seemed to realize that Frank had not fallen, that 'Gene had . . . but of course she remembered they hadn't any idea of a possible connection between Frank and the Powers, and she had been the only one to see 'Gene in that terrible flight from the Rocks. Nelly had thought he had been cultivating corn all day. Of course nobody would think of anything but an accident. Nobody would ever know.

Yes, it was true; it was true that she would touch Neale and never know it, never feel it . . . how closely that had been observed, that she could take a handkerchief from his pocket as from a piece of furniture. It was true that Neale and she knew each other now till there was no hidden corner, no mystery, no possibility of a single unexpected thing between them. She had not realized it, but it was true. How could she not have seen that his presence left her wholly unmoved, indifferent now? But how could she have known it, so gradual had been the coming of satiety, until she had to contrast with it this fierce burning response to a fierce and new emotion? . . .

Had she thought "indifference"? and "satiety"? Of whom had she been thinking? Not of Neale! Was that what had come of the great hour on Rocca di Papa? Was that what human beings were?

She had gone further this time, but now she was brought up short by the same blankness at the name of Neale, the same impossibility to think at all. She could not think about Neale tonight. All that must be put off till she was more like herself, till she was more steady. She was reeling now, with shock after shock; Cousin Hetty's death, 'Gene's dreadful secret, the discovery no longer to be evaded of what Vincent Marsh meant and was. . . .

She felt a sudden hurried impatient haste to be with Vincent again, to feel again the choking throb when she first saw him, the constant scared uncertainty of what he might say, what she might feel, what they both might do, from one moment to the next . . . she could forget, in those fiery and potent draughts, everything, all this that was so hard and painful and that she could not understand and that was such a torment to try to understand. Everything would be swept away except . . .

As though she had whirled suddenly about to see what was lurking there behind her, she whirled about and found the thought, "But I ought to tell someone, tell the police, that I saw 'Gene Powers running away after he had killed the man who wanted to take his wife from him."

Instantly there spoke out a bitter voice, "No, I shall tell no one. 'Gene has known how to keep Nelly. Let him have her for all his life."

Another voice answered, "Frank's mother . . . his mother!"

And both of these were drowned by a tide of sickness as the recollection came upon her of that dreadful haste, those horrible labored breaths.

She sat up with a great sweeping gesture of her arms, as though she must fight for air. The little room seemed palpably crammed with those jostling, shouting, battling thoughts. She slid from the bed and went to the window, leaning far out from it, and looking up at the sky, immeasurably high and black, studded thick with stars.

They looked down disdainfully at her fever and misery. A chilling consolation fell from them upon her, like a cold dew. She felt herself shrink to imperceptible proportions. What did they matter, the struggles of the maggots who crawled about the folds of the globe, itself the most trifling and insignificant of all the countless worlds which people the aimless disorder of the universe? What difference did it make? Anything they did was so soon indistinguishable from anything else. The easiest way . . . to yield to whatever had the strongest present force . . . that was as good as any other way in the great and blind confusion of it all.

After she had gone back to bed, she could still see the silent multitude of stars above her, enormous, remote beyond imagination, and it was under their thin, cold, indifferent gaze that she finally fell asleep.



CHAPTER XXII

EUGENIA DOES WHAT SHE CAN

July 22.

Agnes brought upstairs an armful of white roses. "The lady that visits at your house, she brought them from your garden and she wants to see you if she can."

Eugenia of course. That was unexpected. She must have made an effort to do that, she who hated sickness and death and all dark things.

"Yes, tell her I will be down in a moment. Take her in a glass of cold water, too, will you please, Agnes. The walk over here must have been terribly hot for her."

The roses showed that. They were warm to the touch and as she looked at them intently, at their white clear faces, familiar to her as those of human beings, bent on her with a mute message from the garden, she saw they had begun to droop imperceptibly, that the close, fine texture of their petals had begun ever so slightly to wither. She sprinkled them, put their stems deep into water and went downstairs, wiping her moist hands on her handkerchief.

Eugenia in mauve organdie stood up from the deep Windsor chair where she had sunk down, and came forward silently to greet her. They kissed each other ceremoniously in token of the fact that a death lay between them and the last time they had met . . . was it only yesterday morning?

"Were you able to sleep at all, Marise? You look shockingly tired."

"Oh yes, thanks. I slept well enough. Are the children all right?"

Eugenia nodded, "Yes, as usual."

"Did their father tell them the news of Cousin Hetty's death? How did they take it? Elly perhaps was . . ."

Eugenia did not know about this, had not happened to hear anybody say. But old Toucle was back, at least, to do the work.

"I knew she must be," said Marise. "She was here last night. It was she, you know, who found Frank Warner's body at the foot of . . . of course you've heard of that?"

Eugenia made a little wry face. Of course she had heard of that, she said with an accent of distaste. Everybody was talking about the melodramatic accident, as probably they would still be talking about it a hundred years from now, up here where nothing happened. People had come all the way from North Ashley to look at the place, and some of the men and boys had gone around up to the top of the Eagle Rocks to see where Frank had lost his footing. They found his surveyor's compass still set upon its staff. It was where the line ran very near the edge and Frank must have stepped over the cliff as he was sighting along it. They could see torn leaves and stripped twigs as though he had tried to save himself as he fell.

She stopped speaking. Marise found herself too sick and shaken to venture any comment. There was rather a long silence, such as was natural and suitable under the circumstances, in that house. Presently Marise broke this to ask if anyone knew how Frank's mother had taken the news, although she knew of course Eugenia was the last person of whom to ask such a question. As she expected, Eugenia had only lifted eyebrows, a faint slow shake of her head and a small graceful shrug of her shoulders, her usual formula for conveying her ignorance of common facts, and her indifference to that ignorance.

But Marise, looking at her, as they sat opposite each other in the twilight of the closely shuttered room, was struck by the fact that Eugenia did not seem wholly like herself. Her outward aspect was the same, the usual exquisite exactitude of detail, every blond hair shining and in its place, the flawless perfection of her flesh as miraculous as ever, her tiny white shoe untouched by dust through which she must have walked to reach the house. But there was something . . . in her eyes, perhaps . . . which now looked back at Marise with an expression which Marise did not understand or recognize. If it had not been impossible to think it of Eugenia, Marise would have imagined that her eyes looked troubled, excited. Was it possible that even in her safe ivory tower of aloofness from life, she had felt the jarring blow of the brutally immediate tragedy of the Eagle Rocks? Or perhaps even Cousin Hetty's disappearance . . . she had always hated reminders of death.

As Marise, surprised, looked at her and wondered thus passingly if she felt any reverberation from the tragedy-laden air about them, Eugenia's face hardened back into its usual smooth calm; over the eyes that had been for an instant transparent and alive with troubled brightness, slid their acquired expression of benignant indifference. She answered Marise's faintly inquiring gaze by getting up as if to go, remarking in a clear low tone (she was the only person who had come into the house who had not succumbed to that foolish, instinctive muffling of the voice), "I forgot to give you a message from Neale. He is obliged to be away today, on business, something about a deed to some wood-land."

Marise was slightly surprised. "Where is he going?" she asked. "In the Ford? On the train?" How little she had thought about the mill of late, that she should be so entirely blank as to this business trip.

"Oh, I didn't even try to understand," said Eugenia, smoothing the shining silk of her parasol. "Business finds no echo in me, you know. A man came to supper last night, unexpectedly, and they talked interminably about some deal, lumbering, lines, surveys, deeds . . . till Toucle came in with the news of the accident. The man was from New Hampshire, with that droll, flat New Hampshire accent. You know how they talk, 'bahn' and 'yahd' for barn and yard."

The words "New Hampshire" and "deeds" stirred a disagreeable association of ideas in Marise's mind. The shyster lawyer who had done the Powers out of their inheritance had come from New Hampshire. However, she supposed there were other people in the state besides dishonest lawyers.

Eugenia went on casually. "It seemed quite important. Neale was absorbed by it. He told me afterward, Neale did, that the man had acted as agent for him some years ago in securing a big tract of wood-land around here, something that had been hard to get hold of."

Marise was startled and showed it by a quick lift of her head. She had never known Neale to employ an agent. She looked hard at Eugenia's quiet, indifferent face. The other seemed not to notice her surprise, and returned her look with a long clear gaze, which apparently referred to her hair, for she now remarked in just the tone she had used for the news about Neale, "That way of arranging your coiffure is singularly becoming to you. Mr. Marsh was speaking about it the other day, but I hadn't specially noticed it. He's right. It gives you that swathed close-coifed Leonardo da Vinci look." She put her handkerchief into a small bag of mauve linen, embroidered with white and pale-green crewels, and took up her parasol.