Marise felt something menacing in the air. Eugenia frightened her a little with that glass-smooth look of hers. The best thing to do was to let her go without another word. And yet she heard her voice asking, urgently, peremptorily, "What was the name of the man from New Hampshire?"

Eugenia said, "What man from New Hampshire?" and then, under Marise's silent gaze, corrected herself and changed her tone. "Oh yes, let me see: Neale introduced him, of course. Why, some not uncommon name, and yet not like Smith or Jones. It began with an L, I believe."

Marise said to herself, "I will not say another word about this," and aloud she said roughly, brusquely, "It wasn't Lowder, of course."

"Yes, yes," said Eugenia, "you're right. It was Lowder. I thought it was probably something you'd know about. Neale always tells you everything."

She looked away and remarked, "I suppose you will inherit the furniture of this house? There are nice bits. This Windsor chair; and I thought I saw a Chippendale buffet in the dining-room."

Marise, immobile in her chair, repeated, "It wasn't Lowder. You didn't say it was Lowder."

"Yes, it was Lowder," said Eugenia clearly. "And now you speak of it once more, I remember one more thing about their talk although I didn't try to understand much of it. It was all connected with the Powers family. It was their woodlot which this Mr. Lowder had bought for Neale. I was surprised to know that they had ever had any wood-land. They have always seemed too sordidly poverty-stricken. But it seems this was the only way Neale could get hold of it, because they refused to sell otherwise."

She looked again at Marise, a long, steady, and entirely opaque gaze which Marise returned mutely, incapable of uttering a word. She had the feeling of leaning with all her weight against an inner-door that must be kept shut.

"Did Neale tell you this man had secured the Powers woodlot for him, for Neale, for our mill?" she heard her voice asking, faint in the distance, far off from where she had flung herself against that door.

"Why yes, why not? Not very recently he said, some time ago. We had quite a talk about it afterwards. It must be something you've forgotten," said Eugenia. She took up a card from the table and fanned herself as she spoke, her eyes not quitting Marise's face. "It's going to be as hot as it was yesterday," she said with resignation. "Doesn't it make you long for a dusky, high-ceilinged Roman room with a cool, red-tiled floor, and somebody out in the street shouting through your closed shutters, 'Ricotta! Ricotta!'" she asked lightly.

Marise looked at her blankly. She wished she could lean forward and touch Eugenia to make sure she was really standing there. What was it she had been saying? She could not have understood a word of it. It was impossible that it should be what it seemed to mean,—impossible!

A door somewhere in the house opened and shut, and steps approached. The two women turned their eyes towards the hall-door. Old Mrs. Powers walked in unceremoniously, her gingham dress dusty, her lean face deeply flushed by the heat, a tin pan in her hands, covered with a blue-and-white checked cloth.

"I thought maybe you'd relish some fresh doughnuts as well as anything," she said briskly, with no preliminary of greeting.

Something about the atmosphere of the room struck her oddly for all the composed faces and quiet postures of the two occupants. She brought out as near an apology for intruding, as her phraseless upbringing would permit her. "I didn't see Agnes in the kitchen as I come through, so I come right along, to find somebody," she said, a little abashed.

Marise was incapable of speaking to her, but she made a silent gesture of thanks, and, moving forward, took the pan from the older woman's hand.

Mrs. Powers went on, "If 'twouldn't bother you, could you put them in your jar now, and let me take the pan back with me? We hain't got any too many dishes, you know."

Marise went out to the pantry with the older woman, feeling with astonishment the floor hard and firm under her feet as usual, the walls upright about her. Only something at the back of her throat contracted to a knot, relaxed, contracted, with a singular, disagreeable, involuntary regularity.

"You look down sick, Mis' Crittenden," said Mrs. Powers with a respectful admiration for the suitability of this appearance. "And there ain't nothing surprising that you should. Did you ever see anybody go off more sudden than Miss Hetty? Such a good woman she was, too. It must ha' gi'n you an awful turn." She poured the doughnuts into the jar and, folding the checked cloth, went on, "But I look at it this way. 'Twas a quick end, and a peaceful end without no pain. And if you'd seen as many old people drag along for years, as I have, stranglin' and chokin' and half-dead, why, you'd feel to be thankful Miss Hetty was spared that. And you too!"

"Marise," said Eugenia, coming to the pantry door, "your neighbors wanted me, of course, to bring you all their sympathetic condolence. Mr. Welles asked me to tell you that he would send all the flowers in his garden to the church for the service tomorrow. And Mr. Marsh was very anxious to see you today, to arrange about the use of his car in meeting the people who may come on the train tomorrow, to attend the funeral. He said he would run over here any time today, if you would send Agnes to tell him when you would see him. He said he wouldn't leave the house all day, to be ready to come at any time you would let him."

Mrs. Powers was filled with satisfaction at such conduct. "Now that's what I call real neighborly," she said. "And both on 'em new to our ways too. That Mr. Welles is a real nice old man, anyhow. . . . There! I call him 'old' and I bet he's younger than I be. He acts so kind o' settled down to stay. But Mr. Marsh don't act so. That's the kind man I like to see, up-and-coming, so you never know what he's a-goin' to do next."

Eugenia waited through this, for some answer, and still waited persistently, her eyes on Marise's face.

Marise aroused herself. She must make some comment, of course. "Please thank them both very much," she said finally, and turned away to set the jar on a shelf.

"Well, you goin'?" said Mrs. Powers, behind her, evidently to Eugenia. "Well, good-bye, see you at the funeral tomorrow, I s'pose."

Marise looked around and caught a silent, graceful salutation of farewell from Eugenia, who disappeared down the hall, the front door closing gently behind her.

Mrs. Powers began again abruptly, "Folks is sayin' that Frank Warner must ha' been drinking, but I don't believe it. He wa'n't no drinker. And where'd he git it, if he was? It was heedless, that's what it was. He always was a heedless critter from a little boy up. He was the one that skated right ahead into the hole and most drowned him, and he was fooling with his gran'father's shot-gun when it went off and most blew him to pieces. 'S a wonder he lived to grow up: he come so nigh breaking his neck, before this."

Marise was surprised to hear Eugenia's voice again, "Marise, I stepped back to ask you if there are any errands I could do for you, any messages to take. I pass by the door of Mr. Welles' house. I could perfectly easily stop there and tell Mr. Marsh he could see you now, for instance."

Marise seemed to see her from afar. She heard what she said, but she was aware of it only as an interruption. There was a question she must ask old Mrs. Powers. How could she think of anything else till that had been answered? She said to Eugenia at random, using the first phrase that came into her mind, "No, no. Later. Some other time."

Eugenia hesitated, took a step away from the door, and then came back in, deliberately, close to Marise. She spoke to her in Italian, very clearly, "He is not a man who will wait."

To this Marise, wholly engrossed in her inner struggle, opposed a stupid blankness, an incapacity to think of what Eugenia was saying, long enough to understand it. In that dark inner room, where she kept the door shut against the horror that was trying to come in, she dared not for an instant look away. She merely shook her head and motioned impatiently with her hand. Why did not Eugenia go away?

And yet when Eugenia had gone, she could not bring the words out because of that strange contraction of her throat.

"My! but you ought to go and lie down," said Mrs. Powers compassionately. "You're as white as a sheet. Why don't you just give up for a while? Agnes and I'll tend to things."

Marise was filled with terror at the idea of not getting her answer, and spoke quickly, abruptly. "Mrs. Powers, you never heard, did you, you never thought, in that trouble about losing your wood-land . . . nobody ever thought that Mr. Lowder was only an agent for someone else, whose name wasn't to be known then."

"Oh sure," said Mrs. Powers readily. "'Gene found out from a man that had lived in his town in New Hampshire that Lowder didn't do no lumbering of his own. He just makes a business of dirty deals like that for pay. He always surmised it to be some lumber-company; somebody that runs a mill. Lots of men that run mills do that sort of thing, darn 'em!"

Marise leaned against the pantry shelf. The old woman glanced at her face, gave a cry, and pushed her into a chair, running for water. At the sound, Agnes came trotting, and showed a scared rabbit-like face. "She's just beat out with the shock of Miss Hetty's going off so sudden," explained Mrs. Powers to Agnes.

Marise got to her feet angrily. She had entirely forgotten that Cousin Hetty was dead, or that she was in her house. She was shocked that for a moment she had relaxed her steady pressure against that opening door. She flung herself against it now. What could she do next?

Instantly, clearly, as though she had heard someone saying it to her, she thought, "Why, of course, all I have to do is to go and ask Neale about it!"

It was so simple. Somehow, of course, Neale could give the answer she must have. Why had she not thought of that the instant Eugenia had begun to speak?

She drank the glass of water Agnes gave her and said, "Mrs. Powers, could you do something for me? I promised I would stay here till the funeral and I know Agnes is afraid to stay alone. Would you mind waiting here for perhaps half an hour till I could get to the mill and back? There is something important I must see to."

Mrs. Powers hesitated. "Well now, Mis' Crittenden, there ain't nothing I wouldn't do for you. But I'm kind o' funny about dead folks. I don't believe I'd be much good to Agnes because I feel just the way she does. But I'll run over to the house and get Nelly and 'Gene to come. I guess the four of us together won't be nervous about staying. 'Gene ain't workin' today. He got a sunstroke or something yesterday, in the sun, cultivatin' his corn and he don't feel just right in his head, he says."

She went out of the door as she spoke, calling over her shoulder, "I wun't be gone long."

Marise sat down again, there in the pantry, leaned her head against the door and looked steadily at the shelves before her, full of dishes and jars and bottles and empty jelly glasses. In her mind there was only one thing, a fixed resolve not to think at all, of anything, until she had been to Neale's office and had Neale explain it to her. Surely he would not have started on that trip whatever it was. It was so early still. She must not think about it at all, until she had asked Neale. Eugenia had probably made a mistake about the name. Even if Neale had gone she would be able to ask about the name and find that Eugenia had made a mistake. That would make everything all right. Of course Eugenia had made a mistake about the name.

She was still staring fixedly at the shelves, frowning and beginning again to count all the things on them, when Mrs. Powers' voice sounded from the kitchen. "I met 'em on the way is why I'm back so soon," she explained to Agnes. "Nelly had some flowers to bring. And they've been down by the river and got a great lot of ferns too."

Marise started up, for an instant distracted from her concentration on what Eugenia had said. This was the first time she had seen Nelly and 'Gene since Frank's death. How would they look? How did people go on living? How would they speak, and how could they listen to anything but their own thoughts? What had Frank's death meant to Nelly?

She turned shrinkingly towards Nelly. Nelly was bending down and flicking the dust from her shoes with her handkerchief. When she stood up, she looked straight at Marise. Under the thick-springing, smooth-brushed abundance of her shining fair hair, her eyes, blue as precious stones, looked out with the deep quiet which always seemed so inscrutable to the other woman.

She held out an armful of flowers. "I thought you'd like the white phlox the best. I had a lot of pink too, but I remembered Mrs. Bayweather said white is best at such times."

Marise drew a long breath. What superb self-control!

"Were the biscuits good?" asked Nelly, turning to Agnes. "I was afraid afterward maybe they weren't baked enough."

Marise was swept to her feet. If Nelly could master her nerves like that, she could do better herself. She took the flowers, carried them to the kitchen, and set them in a panful of water. She had not yet looked at 'Gene.

She went to find an umbrella to shield her hatless head from the sun, and on her way out only, cast a swift glance at 'Gene. That was enough. All the blazing, dusty way to the mill, she saw hanging terribly before her that haggard ashy face.

At the mill, she paused in the doorway of the lower office, looking in on the three desk-workers, tapping on their machines, leaning sideways to consult note-books. The young war-cripple, Neale's special protege, seeing her, got to his feet to ask her what he could do for her.

Marise considered him for a moment before she answered. Was there anything he could do for her? Why had she come? All she could remember for the moment was that singular contraction of her throat, which had come back now.

Then she remembered, "Is Mr. Crittenden here?"

"No, he was called away for the day, urgent business in New Hampshire."

Marise looked about her helplessly. "May I sit down for a moment?"

The young stenographer ran, limping and eager, to offer her a chair, and then, shyly, swung his swivel chair towards her, not wishing to go back to his work, uncertain what to say to his employer's wife.

"When will Mr. Crittenden be back?" asked Marise, although she knew the answer.

"No later than tonight, he said," answered the stenographer. "He spoke particularly about coming back because of Miss Hetty Allen's funeral."

"Yes, of course," said Marise.

There was nothing more to be said, she knew that, nothing more to be done, until Neale came back. But it seemed physically impossible for her to live until then, with the clutch in her throat.

She ought to get up now, at once, and go back to Cousin Hetty's. The Powers were waiting for her return. But her consternation at finding Neale really gone was a blow from which she needed a breathing time to recover. She couldn't have it so. She could never endure a whole day with this possibility like a threatening powder-mine under her feet, ready to go off and bring her inner world to ruin and despair. She put her hand out to take her umbrella and struggled up.

"Any message to leave for Mr. Crittenden?" asked the stenographer, seeing her ready to go.

She shook her head. Her eye fell on the waste-paper basket beside the desk. On one of the empty envelopes, torn in two, the words, "Return to C.K. Lowder," stood out clearly. She turned away and stood motionless, one hand at her temple. She was thinking to herself, "This is simply incredible. There is some monstrous mistake. If I could only think of a way to find it out before it kills me."

She became aware that the young cripple was looking at her anxiously, and saw in his startled, agitated face a reflection of what hers must be. She made an effort to speak quietly, and heard herself say, "Do you happen to remember if Mr. Crittenden was alone as he drove away?"

"Oh no," said the other. "He had had someone with him ever since the afternoon train came in yesterday. Mr. Crittenden drove the car in himself to the Ashley station to meet him. Somebody here on business."

"What sort of a man, do you remember?" asked Marise.

"Well, a clean-shaven man, with a queer thin long mouth, like the pictures of William Jennings Bryan's. And he talked out of one corner of it, the way . . . see here, Mrs. Crittenden, you look awfully tired. Wouldn't you better sit down and rest a moment more?"

Marise shook her head with an impatient gesture. Now she needed to get away from that office as much as she had wished to go to it. The place was hateful to her. The young man's eyes were intolerable. He was one of the people, one of the many, many people who had grown up trusting in Neale.

She swung suddenly to a furious incredulity about the whole thing. It was nonsense! None of it could be true. What were all these people saying to her, Eugenia, Mrs. Powers, this boy . . . ? She would never forgive them for trying to do such an infamous thing. They were trying to make her believe that Neale had been back of Lowder in the low-down swindle that had been practised on the Powers. They were trying to make her believe that for seven years Neale had been lying to her with every breath he drew. Because other men could lie, they thought they could make her believe that Neale did. Because other women's husbands had done base things in business, they thought she would be capable of believing that about Neale. They didn't know how preposterous it was, how close she and Neale had always been, how deeply a part of the whole aspect of life to her, Neale's attitude toward his work had become. Those people did not realize what they were trying to make her believe, it was not only that her husband had been the instigator of a mean little cheat which had cost years of suffering to helpless neighbors, it was the total destruction of all that she had thought Neale to be . . . thought him? Known him to be.

"I must get back at once," she said, with a resentful accent and moved towards the door.



CHAPTER XXIII

MARISE LOOKS DOWN ON THE STARS

July 22.

She passed out from the office into the yellow glare of the sun, her feet moving steadily forward, with no volition of hers, along the dusty road. And as steadily, with as little volition of hers, march, march, came . . . first what Eugenia had said, the advance from that to Mrs. Powers' words, from that to the stenographer's, to the name on the envelope . . . and then like the door to a white-hot blast-furnace thrown open in her face, came the searing conception of the possibility that it might be true, and all the world lost.

The extremity and horror of this aroused her to a last effort at self-preservation so that she flung the door shut by a fierce incapacity to believe any of those relentless facts which hung one from another with their horrible enchaining progression. No, she had been dreaming. It was all preposterous!

The heat wavered up from the hot earth in visible pulsations and there pulsed through her similar rhythmic waves of feeling; the beginning . . . what Eugenia had said, had said that Neale had told her . . . what Mrs. Powers had said, "Lots of men that run mills do that sort of thing" . . . what the stenographer had said . . . the name on the envelope . . . suppose it should be true.

She was at Cousin Hetty's door now; a give-and-take of women's voices sounding within. "Here's Mrs. Crittenden back. Come on, Nelly, we better be going. There's all the work to do."

Marise went in and sat down, looking at them with stony indifference, at 'Gene this time as well as at the women. The drawn sickness of his ashy face did not move her in the least now. What did she care what he did, what anyone did, till she knew whether she had ever had Neale or not? The women's chatter sounded remote and foolish in her ears.

If Neale had done that . . . if that was the man he was . . . but of course it was preposterous, and she had been dreaming. What was that that Eugenia had said? The descent into hell began again step by step.

The Powers went out, the old woman still talking, chattering, as if anything mattered now.

After they were gone, Agnes ran to the door calling, "Mis' Powers! You forgot your pan and towel after all!" And there was Mrs. Powers again, talking, talking.

She had been saying something that needed an answer apparently, for now she stood waiting, expectant.

"What was that, Mrs. Powers? I was thinking of something else."

"I was just tellin' you that there's going to be a big change over to our house. 'Gene, he told Nelly, as he was setting here waiting for you, how he was going to cut down the big pine one of these days, like she always wanted him to. You know, the one that shades the house so. 'Gene's grandfather planted it, and he's always set the greatest store by it. Used to say he'd just as soon cut his grandmother's throat as chop it down. But Nelly, she's all housekeeper and she never did like the musty way the shade makes our best room smell. I never thought to see the day 'Gene would give in to her about that. He's gi'n in to her about everything else though. Only last night he was tellin' her, he was going to take something out'n the savings-bank and buy her an organ for Addie to learn to play on, that Nelly always hankered after. Seems 'sthough he can't do enough for Nelly, don't it?"

Marise looked at her coldly, incapable of paying enough attention to her to make any comment on what she said. Let them cut down all the trees in the valley, and each other's throats into the bargain, if Neale had . . . if there had never been her Neale, the Neale she thought she had been living with, all these years.

Mrs. Powers had gone finally, and the house was silent at last, so silent that she could now hear quite clearly, as though Eugenia still sat there, what the sweet musical voice was saying over and over. Why had they gone away and left her alone to face this deadly peril which advanced on her step by step without mercy, time after time? Now there was nothing to do but to wait and stand it off.

* * * * *

She was sitting in the same chair, her umbrella still in her hand, waiting, when Agnes came in to say that she had lunch ready. She turned eyes of astonished anger and rebuke on her. "I don't want anything to eat," she said in so strange a voice that Agnes crept back to the kitchen, shuffling and scared.

She was still sitting there, looking fixedly before her, and frowning, when Agnes came to the door to say timidly that the gentleman had come about using his car to meet the train, and wanted to know if he could see Mrs. Crittenden.

Marise looked at her, frowning, and shook her head. But it was not until late that night that she understood the words that Agnes had spoken.

* * * * *

She was still sitting there, rigid, waiting, when Agnes brought in a lighted lamp, and Marise saw that evening had come. The light was extremely disagreeable to her eyes. She got up stiffly, and went outdoors to the porch, sitting down on the steps.

The stars were beginning to come out now. The sight of them suggested something painful, some impression that belonged to that other world that had existed before this day, before she had conceived the possibility that Neale might not be Neale, might never have been Neale, that there was no such thing for her as human integrity. Was it she who had leaned out from the window and felt herself despised by the height and vastness of the stars? From the height and vastness of her need, she looked down on them now, and found them nothing, mere pin-pricks in the sky, compared to this towering doubt of her, this moral need which shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above the earth. Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in righteousness of a human soul.

She had thought childishly, shallowly last night that she had had no faith, and could live with none. That was because she had not conceived what it would be to try to live without faith, because she had not conceived that the very ground under her feet could give way. At that very moment she had had a faith as boundless as the universe, and had forgotten it. And now it was put in doubt. She could not live without it. It was the only vital thing for her.

Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she loved him or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base . . .

Neale nothing to her? She did not know what he was to her, but the mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death. It was a thousand times worse than death, which was merely material. This mattered a great deal more than the physical death of someone's body . . . it was the murder, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year by year of all her married life, of all she had found lovable and tolerable and beautiful and real in life.

Of course this could not be true . . . of course not . . . but if it were true, she would find the corrosive poison of a false double meaning in every remembered hour. She did not believe any of those hideously marshaled facts, but if they were true, she would go back over all those recollections of their life together and kill them one by one, because every hour of her life had been founded on the most unthinking, the most absolute, the most recklessly certain trust in Neale. To know that past in peril, which she had counted on as safe, more surely than on anything in life, so surely that she had almost dismissed it from her mind like a treasure laid away in a safe hiding-place . . . to know those memories in danger was a new torture that had never before been devised for any human being. No one had the safe and consecrated past taken from him. Its pricelessness shone on her with a blinding light. What if it should be taken away, if she should find she had never had it, at all . . . ?

The idea was so acute an anguish to her that she startled herself by a cry of suffering.

Agnes' voice behind her asked tremblingly, "Did you call me, Miss Marise?"

Marise shifted her position, drew a breath, and answered in a hard tone, "No."

She knew with one corner of her mind that Agnes must be terrified. What if she were? Marise's life-long habit of divining another's need and ministering to it, vanished like a handful of dust in a storm. What did she care about Agnes? What did she care about anything in the world but that she should have back again what she had valued so little as to lose it from her mind altogether? All of her own energy was strained in the bitterness of keeping her soul alive till Neale should come. She had not the smallest atom of strength to care about the needs of anyone else.

She looked up at the stars, disdainful of them. How small they were, how unimportant in the scheme of things, so much less able to give significance to the universe, than the presence of integrity in a human soul.

If she could have Neale back again, as she had always had him without thinking of it, if she could have her faith in him again, the skies might shrivel up like a scroll, but something eternal would remain in her life.

* * * * *

It seemed to her that she heard a faint sound in the distance, on the road, and her strength ran out of her like water. She tried to stand up but could not.

Yes, it was the car, approaching. The two glaring headlights swept the white road, stopped, and went out. For an instant the dark mass stood motionless in the starlight. Then something moved, a man's tall figure came up the path.

"Is that you, Marise?" asked Neale's voice.

She had not breath to speak, but all of her being cried out silently to him the question which had had all the day such a desperate meaning for her, "Is that you, Neale?"



PART IV



CHAPTER XXIV

NEALE'S RETURN

July 22. Evening.

He stooped to kiss her and sank down beside her where she sat cowering in the dark. Although she could not see his face clearly Marise knew from his manner that he was very tired, from the way he sat down, taking off his cap, and his attitude as he leaned his head back against the pillar. She knew this without thinking about it, mechanically, with the automatic certainty of a long-since acquired knowledge of him. And when he spoke, although his voice was quiet and level, she felt a great fatigue in his accent.

But he spoke with his usual natural intonation, which he evidently tried to make cheerful. "I'm awfully glad you're still up, dear. I was afraid you'd be too tired, with the funeral coming tomorrow. But I couldn't get here any sooner. I've been clear over the mountain today. And I've done a pretty good stroke of business that I'm in a hurry to tell you about. You remember, don't you, how the Powers lost the title to their big woodlot? I don't know if you happen to remember all the details, how a lawyer named Lowder . . ."

"I remember," said Marise, speaking for the first time, "all about it."

"Well," went on Neale, wearily but steadily, "up in Nova Scotia this time, talking with one of the old women in town, I ran across a local tradition that, in a town about ten miles inland, some of the families were descended from Tory Yankees who'd been exiled from New England, after the Revolution. I thought it was worth looking up, and one day I ran up there to see if I could find out anything about them. It was Sunday and I had to . . ."

Marise was beside herself, her heart racing wildly. She took hold of his arm and shook it with all her might. "Neale, quick! quick! Leave out all that. What did you do?"

She could see that he was surprised by her fierce impatience, and for an instant taken aback by the roughness of the interruption. He stared at her. How slow Neale was!

He began, "But, dear, why do you care so much about it? You can't understand about what I did, if I don't tell you this part, the beginning, how I . . ." Then, feeling her begin to tremble uncontrollably, he said hastily, "Why, of course, Marise, if you want to know the end first. The upshot of it all is that I've got it straightened out, about the Powers woodlot. I got track of those missing leaves from the Ashley Town Records. They really were carried away by that uncle of yours. I found them up in Canada. I had a certified copy and tracing made of them. It's been a long complicated business, and the things only came in yesterday's mail, after you'd been called over here. But I'd been in correspondence with Lowder, and when I had my proofs in hand, I telephoned him and made him come over yesterday afternoon. It was one of the biggest satisfactions I ever expect to have, when I shoved those papers under his nose and watched him curl up. Then I took him back today, myself, to his own office, not to let him out of my sight, till it was all settled. There was a great deal more to it . . . two or three hours of fight. I bluffed some, about action by the bar-association, disbarment, a possible indictment for perjury, and seemed to hit a weak spot. And finally I saw him with my own eyes burn up that fake warranty-deed. And that's all there is to that. Just as soon as we can get this certified copy admitted and entered on our Town Records, 'Gene can have possession of his own wood-land. Isn't that good news?"

He paused and added with a tired, tolerant, kindly accent, "Now Nelly will have fourteen pairs of new shoes, each laced higher up than the others, and I won't be the one to grudge them to her."

He waited for a comment and, when none came, went on doggedly making talk in that resolutely natural tone of his. "Now that you know the end, and that it all came out right, you ought to listen to some details, for they are queer. The missing pages weren't in that first town I struck at all. Nothing there but a record of a family of Simmonses who had come from Ashley in 1778. They had . . ."

Marise heard nothing more of what he said, although his voice went on with words the meaning of which she could not grasp. It did not seem to her that she had really understood with the whole of her brain anything he had said, or that she had been able to take in the significance of it. She could think of nothing but a frightening sensation all over her body, as though the life were ebbing out of it. Every nerve and fiber in her seemed to have gone slack, beyond anything she had ever conceived. She could feel herself more and more unstrung and loosened like a violin string let down and down. The throbbing ache in her throat was gone. Everything was gone. She sat helpless and felt it slip away, till somewhere in the center of her body this ebbing of strength had run so far that it was a terrifying pain, like the approach of death. She was in a physical panic of alarm, but unable to make a sound, to turn her head.

It was when she heard a loud insistent ringing in her head, and saw the stars waver and grow dim that she knew she was fainting away.

* * * * *

Then she was lying on the sofa in Cousin Hetty's sitting-room, Neale bending over her, holding a handkerchief which smelled of ammonia, and Agnes, very white, saying in an agitated voice, "It's because she hasn't eaten a thing all day. She wouldn't touch her lunch or supper. It's been turrible to see her."

Marise's head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if washed clean by its temporary absence from life. She tried to sit up and smile at Neale and Agnes. She had never fainted away in all her life before. She felt very apologetic and weak. And she felt herself in a queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her. His face was grave and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was. It was like Neale not to lose his head. He said to Agnes, "Give me that cup of cocoa," and when it came, he held it to Marise's lips. "Take a good swallow of that," he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began to eat it with a child's appetite. She was not ashamed or self-conscious in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now. But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale's sense of things as they were.

The food was delicious. She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

"Well, for Heaven's sake!" said Neale, looking down at her.

"I know it," she said. "I'm an awful fool."

"No, you're not," he contradicted. "That's what makes me so provoked with you now, going without eating since morning."

Agnes put in, "It's the suddenness of it that was such a shock. It takes me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into my mouth. I can't get it down. And you don't know how lost I feel not to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat. I feel so gone!"

"You must go to bed this minute," said Neale. "I'll go right back to the children."

He remembered suddenly. "By George, I haven't had anything to eat since noon, myself." He gave Marise an apologetic glance. "I guess I haven't any stones to throw at your foolishness."

Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and butter. Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat.

* * * * *

She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new birth. She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years. And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face. What she seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little, the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his features, but which his life had wrought out there.

Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with it everything. That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind, and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as she had never done before.

In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale's life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed. She had been right in thinking that there was something there which would outlast the mere stars.

He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her. She found the gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to her own. . . . But she winked them back. There had been enough foolishness from her, for one day.

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his; cap, took it up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little. Marise thought, "Neale is as natural in his life as a very great actor is in his art. Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, is done with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and paltry."

There was a moment's silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather haggard and grim, giving himself a moment's respite in his chair before standing up to go; Marise passive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents aimlessly from one to the other.

Then Agnes turned, and showed a shamed, nervous old face. "I don't know what's got into me, Miss Marise, that I ain't no good to myself nor anybody else. I'm afraid to go back into the kitchen alone." She explained to Neale, "I never was in the house with a dead body before, Mr. Crittenden, and I act like a baby about it, scared to let Mrs. Crittenden out of my sight. If I'm alone for a minute, seems 'sthough . . ." She glanced over her shoulder fearfully and ended lamely, "Seems 'sthough I don't know what might happen."

"I won't leave you alone, Agnes, till it is all over," said Marise, and this time she kept contempt not only out of her voice, but out of her heart. She was truly only very sorry for the old woman with her foolish fears.

Agnes blinked and pressed her lips together, the water in her eyes. "I'm awful glad to hear you say that!" she said fervently.

Marise closed her eyes for a moment. It had suddenly come to her that this promise to Agnes meant that she could not see Neale alone till after the funeral, tomorrow, when she went back into life again. And she found that she immensely wanted to see him alone this very hour, now! And Agnes would be there . . . !

She opened her eyes and saw Neale standing up, his cap in his hand, looking at her, rough and brown and tall and tired and strong; so familiar, every line and pose and color of him; as familiar and unexciting, as much a part of her, as her own hand.

As their eyes met in the profound look of intimate interpenetration which can pass only between a man and a woman who have been part of each other, she felt herself putting to him clearly, piercingly, the question which till then she had not known how to form, "Neale, what do you want me to do?"

She must have said it aloud, and said it with an accent which carried its prodigious import, for she saw him turn very white, saw his eyes deepen, his chest lift in a great heave. He came towards her, evidently not able to speak for a moment. Then he took her hands . . . the memory of a thousand other times was in his touch . . .

He looked at her as though he could never turn his eyes away. The corners of his mouth twitched and drew down.

He said, in a deep, trembling, solemn voice, "Marise, my darling, I want you always to do what is best for you to do."

He drew a deep, deep breath as though it had taken all his strength to say that; and went on, "What is deepest and most living in you . . . that is what must go on living."

He released one hand and held it out towards her as though he were taking an oath.



CHAPTER XXV

MARISE'S COMING-OF-AGE

July 23. Dawn

Even after the old child, Agnes, had been soothed and reassured, over and over, till she had fallen asleep, and the house lay profoundly quiet, Marise felt not the slightest approach of drowsiness or even of fatigue. She lay down on her bed, but could not close her eyes. They remained wide open, looking not at a wild confusion of incoherent images as they had the night before, but straight into blackness and vacancy.

It was strange how from the brawling turmoil of impressions which had shouted and cried out to her the night before, and had wrought her to frenzy by their insane insistence, not an echo reached her now. Her mind was as silent and intent as the old house, keeping its last mute watch over its mistress. Intent on what? She did not know. On something that was waiting for her, on something for which she was waiting.

In an immense hush, like the dusky silence in a cathedral aisle or in the dark heart of the woods, there was something there waiting for her to go and find it.

That hush had fallen on her at the sight of Neale's face, at the sound of his voice, as he had looked at her and spoken to her, at the last, just before he went away back to the children. Those furiously racing pulses of hers had been stilled by it into this steady rhythm which now beat quietly through her. The clashing thoughts which had risen with malevolent swiftness, like high, battling shadowy genii, and had torn her in pieces as they fought back and forth, were stilled as though a master-word had been spoken which they must all obey.

The old house, silent under the stars, lay quiet in its vigil about her, but slept no more than she; the old house which had been a part of her childhood and her youth now watched over her entry into another part of her journey.

For as she lay there, wide-awake, watching the light of the candle, she felt that she knew what was waiting for her, what she must go to find. It was her maturity.

And as she lay quiet, her ears ringing in the solemn hush which Neale's look and voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining and alive.

She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her arms around her knees, and began to think.

Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions passed back and forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to understand it.

As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale's belief that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried, what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand, with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid of what she might find, but she set forth.

She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression.

The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never again would Mark fill that place.

Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things.

There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull, unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand ways, there had been brought home to her by Vincent, by Eugenia, the fact that there were lives so arranged that other people did all the drudgery, and left one free to perceive nothing but the beauty and delicacy of existence. Now, straight at it! With all the knowledge of herself and of life which she had gathered,—straight at it, to see what this meant! Did their entire freedom from drudgery give them a keener sense of the beauty and delicacy of existence? Were they more deeply alive because of the ease of their lives?

She cast about her for evidence, in a firm, orderly search among the materials which life had brought to her. Had she seen anything which could give evidence on that? There was Eugenia; Eugenia and her friends had always lived that life of rich possessions and well-served ease. What had it made of them? Was their sense of beauty deeper and more living because of it? No, not in the least.

She turned her inward eye on Eugenia's life, on the lives of the people in that circle, in a long searching gaze. Was it deep in eternal values? Was it made up of a constant recurrence of sensitive aliveness to what is most worth responding to? Odd, that it did not seem to be! They were petulant, and bored, and troubled about minute flaws in their ease, far more than they were deep in communion with beauty.

Another piece of evidence came knocking at the door now, a picture of quaint and humble homeliness . . . herself standing before the stove with the roast on a plate, and little Mark saying fastidiously, "Oh, how nasty raw meat looks!" She recalled her passing impatience with the childishness of that comment, her passing sense of the puerile ignorance of the inherent unity of things, in such an attitude of eagerness to feed on results and unwillingness to take one's share of what leads up to results. Yes, it was more there, than in looking at Eugenia, that she could find evidence. Did she want to be of those who sat afar off and were served with the fine and delicate food of life, and knew nothing of the unsavory process of preparing it? It had seemed to her this summer, a thousand times with Vincent's eyes on her, scornful of her present life, that she did want it, that she wanted that more than anything else. Now let her look full at it. She was a grown woman now, who could foresee what it would mean.

She looked full at it, set herself there in her imagination, in the remote ivory tower and looked out from its carven windows at the rough world where she had lived and worked, and from which she would henceforth be protected . . . and shut out. She looked long, and in the profound silence, both within and without her, she listened to the deepest of the voices in her heart.

And she knew that it was too late for that. She had lived, and she could not blot out what life had brought to her. She could never now, with a tranquil heart, go into the ivory tower. It would do her no good to shut and bar the golden door a hundred times behind her, because she would have with her, everywhere she went, wrought into the very fiber of her being, a guilty sense of all the effort and daily strain and struggle in which she did not share.

She saw no material good accomplished by taking her share. The existence in the world of so much drudgery and unlovely slavery to material processes was an insoluble mystery; but a life in which her part of it would be taken by other people and added to their own burdens . . . no, she had grown into something which could not endure that!

Perhaps this was one of the hard, unwelcome lessons that the war had brought to her. She remembered how she had hated the simple comforts of home, the safety, the roof over her head, because they were being paid for by such hideous sufferings on the part of others; how she had been ashamed to lie down in her warm bed when she thought of Neale and his comrades in the trench-mud, in the cold horror of the long drenching nights, awaiting the attack; and she had turned sick to see the long trains of soldiers going out while she stayed safely behind and bore no part in the wretchedness which war is. There had been no way for her to take her part in that heavy payment for her safety and comfort; but the bitterness of those days had shocked her imagination alive to the shame of sharing and enjoying what she had not helped to pay for, to the disharmony of having more than your share while other people have less than theirs.

This was nothing she had consciously sought for. She felt no dutiful welcome that it had come; she bent under it as under a burden. But it was there. Life had made her into one of the human beings capable of feeling that responsibility, each for all, and the war had driven it home, deep into her heart, whence she could not pluck it out.

She might never have known it, never have thought of it, if she had been safely protected by ignorance of what life is like. But now she knew, living had taught her; and that knowledge was irrevocably part of the woman she had become.

Wait now! Was this only habit, routine, dulled lack of divining imagination of what another life could be? That was the challenge Vincent would throw down. She gazed steadily at the wall before her, and called up, detail by detail, the life which Vincent Marsh thought the only one that meant richness and abundance for the human spirit. It hung there, a shimmering mass of lovely colors and exquisite textures and fineness and delicacy and beauty. And as she looked at it, it took on the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, alive and rooted deep!

This faded out and left her staring at the blank wall again, feeling old and stern.

Nothing more came for a moment, and restless, feeling no bodily fatigue at all, she got out of her bed, took up the candle, and stepped aimlessly out into the hall. The old clock at the end struck a muffled stroke, as if to greet her. She held up her candle to look at it. Half-past two in the morning. A long time till dawn would come.

She hesitated a moment and turned towards the door of a garret room which stood open. She had not been in there for so long,—years perhaps; but as a child she had often played there among the old things, come down from the dead, who were kept in such friendly recollection in this house. Near the door there had been an old, flat-topped, hair-covered trunk . . . yes, here it was, just as it had been. Nothing ever changed here. She sat down on it, the candle on the floor beside her, and saw herself as a little girl playing among the old things.

A little girl! And now she was the mother of a little girl. So short a time had passed! She understood so very little more than when she had been the little girl herself. Yet now there was Elly who came and stood by her, and looked at her, and asked with all her eyes and lips and being, "Mother, what is the meaning of life?"

What answer had she to give? Was she at all more fit than anyone else to try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea? And if we did, why break one's heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt. Did her children . . . could they . . . give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her gift of her life to them? They were already beginning to go away from her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live their lives with no place for her in them.

She sat there on the old trunk and saw the endless procession of parents and children passing before her, the children so soon parents, all driven forward by what they could not understand, yearning and starving for what was not given them, all wrapped and dimmed in the twilight of their doubt and ignorance. Where were they going? And why? So many of them, so many!

Her humbled spirit was prostrate before their mystery, before the vastness of the whole, of which she and her children were only a part, a tiny, lowly part.

With this humbling sense of the greatness of the whole, something swollen and sore in her heart gave over its aching, as though a quieting hand had been laid on it. She drew a long breath. Oh, from what did it come, this rest from that sore bitterness?

It came from this, that she had somehow been shown that what she wanted was not love from her children for herself. That was trying to drive a bargain to make them pay for something they had never asked to have. What she wanted was not to get love, to get a place in their lives for herself, to get anything from them, but to give them all that lay in her to give. If that was what she wanted, why, nothing, nothing could take it away. And it was truly . . . in this hour of silence and searching . . . she saw that it was truly what she wanted. It was something in her which had grown insensibly to life and strength, during all those uncounted hours of humble service to the children. And it was something golden and immortal in her poor, flawed, human heart.

* * * * *

A warm bright wave of feeling swept over her . . . there, distinct and rounded against the shadowy confused procession of abstract ideas about parents and children, there stood looking at her out of their clear loving eyes, Paul and Elly and little Mark, alive, there, a part of her; not only themselves but her children; not only her children but themselves; human life which she and Neale had created out of the stuff of the universe. They looked at her and in their regard was the clear distillation of the innumerable past hours when they had looked at her with love and trust.

At the sight of them, her own children, her heart swelled and opened wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive, never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its power to hurt and poison her gone.

She had no words for this . . . she could not even try to understand it. It was as solemn a birth-hour to her, as the hour when she had first heard the cry of her new-born babies . . . she was one mother then, she had become another mother now. She turned to bless the torment of bitter, doubting questioning of what she had called mother-love, which had forced her forward blindly struggling, till she found this divination of a greater possibility.

She had been trying to span the unfathomable with a mean and grasping desire. Now she knew what she must try to do; to give up the lesser and receive the greater.

* * * * *

This passed and left her, looking straight before her at the flickering shadows, leaping among the dusky corners of the dark slant-ceilinged room. The old clock struck three in the hall behind her.

She felt tired now, as she had after the other travail which had given her her children, and leaned her head on her hand. Where did she herself, her own personal self come in, with all this? It was always a call to more effort which came. To get the great good things of life how much you had to give! How much of what seemed dearly yourself, you had to leave behind as you went forward! Her childhood was startlingly called up by this old garret, where nothing had changed: she could still see herself, running about there, happily absorbed in the vital trivialities of her ten years. She had not forgotten them, she knew exactly the thrill felt by that shadowy little girl as she leaned over the old chest yonder, and pulled out the deep-fringed shawl and quilted petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had seemed to her then. A kingdom of security from which she was now shut out.

And the games, the fantastic plays,—how whole and rounded and entire, the pleasure in them! She remembered the rainy day she had played paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon . . . dead, years ago, that much-loved playmate of past summer days . . . and how they had taken the chest for the house for Margaret's dolls, and the hair-trunk where she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk. A faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very long. And . . . why, there it was, the doll's room, just as they had left it, how long ago! How like this house! How like Cousin Hetty never to have touched it!

She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought with a backward look of longing.

And then the honest, unsparing habit of her life with Neale shook her roughly. This was sentimentalizing. If she could, would she give up what she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come? If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of the child who had died in her heart? Would she choose to give up the home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no, she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind. Nor would she, if she could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small trinkets of the past.

All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.

Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and flung to the fury of the waves . . . and she met them with an answering tumult of welcome. That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted to do for her,—that wonderful, miraculous thing,—give back to her something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth, and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity of newly-born passion which had come into her life, and gone, before she had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it. He could lift her from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors, and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing, save one man and one woman.

She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life, had had it, and little by little had lost it. It had crumbled away insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life's battering always brings. But she could have it again; with a grown woman's strength and depth of feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth. She had spent it, but now she could have it again. That was what Vincent meant.

He seemed to lean over her now, his burning, quivering hand on hers. She felt a deep hot flush rise to her face, all over her body. She was like a crimson rose, offering the splendor of its maturity to be plucked. Let her have the courage to know that its end and aim and fulfilment lay in being plucked and gloriously worn before the coming of the inevitable end! Thus and thus only could one find certainty, before death came, of having lived as deeply as lay in one to live.

* * * * *

Through the glowing pride and defiance with which she felt herself rise to the challenge, felt herself strong to break and surmount all obstacles within and without, which stood in the way of that fulfilment of her complete self, she had heard . . . the slightest of trivialities . . . a thought gone as soon as it was conceived . . . nothing of the slightest consequence . . . harmless . . . insignificant . . . yet why should it give off the betraying clink of something flawed and cracked? . . . She had heard . . . it must have come from some corner of her own mind . . . something like this, "Set such an alternative between routine, traditional, narrow domestic life, and the mightiness and richness of mature passion, before a modern, free European woman, and see how quickly she would grasp with all her soul for passion."

What was there about this, the veriest flying mote among a thousand others in the air, so to awaken in Marise's heart a deep vibration of alarm? Why should she not have said that? she asked herself, angry and scared. Why was it not a natural thought to have had? She felt herself menaced by an unexpected enemy, and flew to arms.

Into the rich, hot, perfumed shrine which Vincent's remembered words and look had built there about her, there blew a thin cool breath from the outside, through some crack opened by that casual thought. Before she even knew from whence it came, Marise cried out on it, in a fury of resentment . . . and shivered in it.

With no apparent volition of her own, she felt something very strong within her raise a mighty head and look about, stirred to watchfulness and suspicion by that luckless phrase.

She recognized it . . . the habit of honesty of thought, not native to Marise's heart, but planted there by her relation with Neale's stark, plain integrity. Feeding unchecked on its own food, during the long years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger, till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely falsities.

She could no more stop its advance now, straight though it made its way over treasures she fain would keep, than she could stop the beating of her heart.

A ruthless question or two . . . "Why did you say that about what a modern, free European woman would do in your place? Are you trying to play up to some trumpery notion of a role to fill? And more than this, did you really mean in your heart an actual, living woman of another race, such as you knew in Europe; or did you mean somebody in an Italian, or a French, or a Scandinavian book?" Marise writhed against the indignity of this, protested fiercely, angrily against the incriminating imputation in it . . . and with the same breath admitted it true.

It was true. She was horrified and lost in grief and humiliation at the cheapened aspect of what had looked so rich before. Had there been in truth an element of such trashy copying of the conventional pose of revolt in what had seemed so rushingly spontaneous? Oh no, no . . . not that!

She turned away and away from the possibility that she had been partially living up to other people's ideas, finding it intolerable; and was met again and again by the relentless thrust of that acquired honesty of thought which had worn such deep grooves in her mind in all these years of unbroken practice of it. "You are not somebody in a book, you are not a symbol of modern woman who must make the gestures appropriate for your part . . ." One by one, that relentless power seated in her many-colored tumultuous heart put out the flaring torches.

It had grown too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with experience of reality, she could not turn and bend quickly enough to escape it.

It had profited too well by all those honest years with Neale . . . never to have been weakened by a falsehood between them, by a shade of pretense of something more, or different from what really was there. That habit held her mercilessly to see what was there now. She could no more look at what was there and think it something else, than she could look with her physical eyes at a tree and call it a dragon.

If it had only been traditional morality, reproaching her with traditional complaints about the overstepping of traditional bounds, how she could have overwhelmed it, drowned out its feeble old voice, with eloquent appeals for the right to growth, to freedom, to the generous expansion of the soul, of the personality, which Vincent Marsh could give. But honesty only asked her neutrally, "Is it really growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul?" Poor Marise felt her arms fall to her side, piteous and defenseless. No, it was not.

It was with the flatness of accent which she hated, which was so hard for her, that she made the admission. It was physical excitement,—that was what it was. Physical excitement, that was what Vincent Marsh could give her which Neale no longer could. . . . That and great ease of life, which Neale never would. There was a pause in which she shivered, humiliated. She added lamely to this, a guessed-at possibility for aesthetic sympathy and understanding, perhaps more than Neale could . . . and broke off with a qualm of sickness. How horrid this was! How it offended a deep sense of personal dignity and decency! How infinitely more beautiful and gracious those rolling clouds of vagueness and impulsive illusion!

But at least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that stern sense of reality let her alone. She no longer felt like a beetle impaled on a pin. She was free now to move as she liked and look unmolested at what she pleased. Honesty had no more power over her than to make sure she saw what she was pretending to look at.

But at what a diminished pile she had now to look, tarnished and faded like the once-loved bits of bright-colored silk and paper. She felt robbed and cried out in a pain which seemed to her to come from her very heart, that something living and vital and precious to her had been killed by that rough handling. But one warning look from the clear eyes of honesty forced her, lamenting, to give up even this. If it had been living and precious and vital to her, it would have survived anything that honesty could have done to it.

But something had survived, something to be reckoned with, something which no tyrant, overbearing honesty could put out of her life . . . the possibility for being carried away in the deep full current of passion, fed by all the multitudinous streams of ripened personality. If that was all that was left, was not that enough? It had been for thousands of other women. . . .

No, not that; honesty woke to menace again. What thousands of other women had done had no bearing here. She was not thousands of other women. She was herself, herself. Would it be enough for her?

Honesty issued a decree of impartial justice. Let her look at it with a mature woman's experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as it would be and see for herself if it would be enough. She was no girl whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had literally experienced. She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom without which no human decision can be taken. Neale's strong hand had opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could not . . . that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning.

It was as though something were holding her gripped and upright there, staring before her, motionless, till she had put herself to the last supreme test. She closed her eyes, and sat so immobile, rapt in the prodigious effort of her imagination and will, that she barely breathed. How would it be? Would it be enough? She plunged the plummet down, past the fury and rage of the storm on the surface, past the teeming life of the senses, down to the depths of consciousness. . . .

And what she brought up from those depths was a warning distaste, a something offending to her, to all of her, now she was aware of it.

She was amazed. Why should she taste an acrid muddy flavor of dregs in that offered cup of heavy aromatic wine, she who had all her life thanked Heaven for her freedom from the ignominy of feeling it debasing to be a woman who loved? It was glorious to be a woman who loved. There had been no dregs left from those sweet, light, heady draughts she and Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying draughts they knew now. What was the meaning of that odor of decay about what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had? Why should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and tainting which she had never felt? Was she too old for passion? But she was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried out for it. Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she could not have it again? Could it be that one could not go back, there, any more than . . .

Oh, what did that bring to mind? What was that fleeting cobweb of thought that seemed a recurrence of a sensation only recently passed? When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited passion was worth all else in life, was the one great and real thing worth all the many small shams . . . what was it she had felt?

She groped among the loose-hanging filaments of impression and brought it out to see. It seemed to be . . . could it have been, the same startled recoil as at the notion of getting back the peace of childhood by giving up her home for the toy-house; her living children for the dolls?

* * * * *

Now, for the great trial of strength. Back! Push back all those thick-clustering, intruding, distracting traditional ideas of other people on both sides; the revolt on one hand, the feeble resignation on the other; what other women did; what people had said. . . . Let her wipe all that off from the too-receptive tablets of her mind. Out of sight with all that. This was her life, her question, hers alone. Let her stand alone with her own self and her own life, and, with honesty as witness, ask herself the question . . . would she, if she could, give up what she was now, with her myriads of roots, deep-set in the soil of human life, in order to bear the one red rose, splendid though it might be?

That was the question.

With no conscious volition of hers, the answer was there, plain and irrefutable as a fact in the physical world. No, she would not choose to do that. She had gone on, gone on beyond that. She was almost bewildered by the peremptory certainty with which that answer came, as though it had lain inherent in the very question.

* * * * *

And now another question crowded forward, darkly confused, charged with a thousand complex associations and emotions. There had been something displeasing and preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into the narrow limits of a child's toy-house. Could it be that she felt something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult affections back to . . .

But at this there came a wild protesting clamor, bursting out to prevent her from completing this thought; loud, urgent voices, men's, women's, with that desperate certainty of their ground which always struck down any guard Marise had been able to put up. They cried her down as a traitor to the fullness of life, those voices, shouting her down with all the unquestioned authority she had encountered so many times on that terribly vital thing, the printed page; they clashed in their fury and all but drowned each other out. Only disconnected words reached her, but she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . . "puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . . prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with the life-purpose . . . with the end of passion life declines and dies."

The first onslaught took Marise's breath, as though a literal storm had burst around her. She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times before. She lost her hold on her staff . . . what had that staff been?

At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What is deepest and most living in you." Well, what was deepest and most living in her? That was what she was trying to find out. That was what those voices were trying to cry her down from finding.

For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale's resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle. What right had those people to cry her down? She would not submit to it.

She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other people's voices, other people's thoughts, and she would go on steadily, thinking her own.

She had been thinking that there was the same displeasure and distaste as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits of passion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing of something greater to come.

She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement. But after all, how would they dare? This was what she had found in her own heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her from seeing. She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what she really did feel. She did not feel what traditionally she should feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose emotional life had found no other outlet than sex. . . .

Well, if it was so, it was so. For better or for worse, that was the kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken possession of her days. And she could not think that the child could ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her horizon again limited by a doll-house. To be herself was to go on, not to go back, now that she knew what she had become. It seemed to her that never before had she stood straight up.

And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant ceiling. She could have laughed out, to find herself so free. She knew now why she had never known the joy of battle. It was because she had been afraid. And she had been afraid because she had never dared to enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her. Now she had been forced into it and had won. And there was nothing to be afraid of, there!

She spread out her arms in a great gesture of liberation. How had she ever lived before, under the shadow of that coward fear? This . . . this . . . she had a moment of vision . . . this was what Neale had been trying to do for her, all these years, unconsciously, not able to tell her what it was, driving at the mark only with the inarticulate wisdom of his love for her, his divination of her need. He had seen her, shivering and shrinking in the shallow waters, and had longed for her sake to have her strike out boldly into the deep. But even if he had been ever so able to tell her, she would not have understood till she had fought her way through those ravening breakers, beyond them, out into the sustaining ocean.

How long it took, how long for men and women to make the smallest advance! And how the free were the only ones who could help to liberate the bound. How she had fought against Neale's effort to set her free, had cried to him that she dared not risk herself on the depths, that he must have the strength to swim for her . . . and how Neale, doggedly sure of the simple truth, too simple for her to see, had held to the certainty that his effort would not make her strong, and that she would only be free if she were strong.

Neale being his own master, a free citizen of life, knew what a kingdom he owned, and with a magnanimity unparalleled could not rest till she had entered hers. She, not divining what she had not known, had only wished to make the use of his strength which would have weakened her. Had there ever before been any man who refused to let the woman he loved weaken herself by the use of his strength? Had a man ever before held out his strong hand to a woman to help her forward, not to hold her fast?

Her life was her own. She stood in it, knowing it to be an impregnable fortress, knowing that from it she could now look abroad fearlessly and understandingly, knowing that from it she could look at things and men and the world and see what was there. From it she could, as if for the first time, look at Vincent Marsh when next she saw him; she would look to see what was really there. That was all. She would look at him and see what he was, and then she would know the meaning of what had happened, and what she was to do. And no power on earth could prevent her from doing it. The inner bar that had shut her in was broken. She was a free woman, free from that something in her heart that was afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!

* * * * *

The old clock in the hall behind her sounded four muffled strokes and, as if it had wakened her, Agnes stirred in her bed and cried out in a loud voice of terror, "Oh, come quick, Miss Marise! Come!"

Marise went through the hail and to her door, and saw the frightened old eyes glaring over the pulled-up sheet. "Oh . . . oh . . . it's you . . . I thought. . . . Oh, Miss Marise, don't you see anything standing in that corner? Didn't you hear. . . . Oh, Miss Marise, I must have had a bad dream. I thought . . ." Her teeth were chattering. She did not know what she was saying.

"It's all right, Agnes," said Marise soothingly, stepping into the room. "The big clock just struck four. That probably wakened you."

She sat down on the bed and laid her hand firmly on Agnes' shoulder, looking into the startled old eyes, which grew a little quieter now that someone else was there. What a pitiable creature Agnes' dependence on Cousin Hetty had made of her.

Like the boom from a great bell came the thought, "That is what I wanted Neale to make of me, when the crucial moment came, a dependent . . . but he would not."

"What time did you say it is?" Agnes asked, still breathing quickly but with a beginning of a return to her normal voice.

"Four o'clock," answered Marise gently, as to a child. "It must be almost light outside. The last night when you have anything to fear is over now."

She went to the window and opened the shutter. The ineffable sacred pureness of another dawn came in, gray, tranquil, penetrating.

At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful tears come to her eyes.

"See, Agnes," she said in an unsteady voice, "daylight has come. You can look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid of."



CHAPTER XXVI

MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE

A Torch in a Living Tree

July 24.

Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.

He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing, on fire with joy and his need for her.

For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.

He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it, whatever it was.

She did not seem tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently, intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention in her face, usually so sensitively changing. He felt a resentment at its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her own, her wonderful gift to him. She was looking at him now as she might have looked at any one else, merely in order to see what was there.

Well, he would show her what was there! The will to conquer rose high and strong in him, with an element of fierceness it had not had before because no resistance had called it out. He did not show this, indeed only allowed it the smallest corner of his consciousness, keeping all the rest tautly on the alert for the first indication of an opening, for the first hint of where to throw his strength.

But standing in suspense on the alert was the last role he could long endure, and in a moment, when she did not answer, he took a step towards her, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders, pouring out with a hot sense of release all his longing into the cry, "Marise, Marise my own, what has happened to you?"

How he hated the quiet of her face! With what hungry impatience he watched to see it break. How surely he counted on its disappearance at his touch. For he had the certainty of his power to kindle her left intact from the last time he had seen her, tinder to his spark, helplessly played upon by his voice.

But now it was as though he had held a torch aloft into the green branches of a living tree. A twitch of surface agitation on her face and that was all.

And when she spoke, as she did at once, the sound of her voice was strange and alien to him. With an extreme directness, and with a deep sincerity of accent which, even to his ears, made his own impassioned outcry to her sound inflated and false, she said earnestly, "I don't believe I can tell you what has happened. I don't believe you could understand it."

He did not believe a word of this, but with his brilliant suppleness of mind he perceived that he was in the wrong key. She was not, for the moment, to be kindled to flame, she who miraculously was never the same. Perhaps it was the moment for a thrust of sheer power, straight at the obstacle, for of course he knew the obstacle.

"I know what has happened," he said, "without your telling me. Your husband has made a scene, and overborne you, and is trying to force you back into the hen-yard of domestic virtue. . . ." He changed his manner. He said in a low, beautiful, persuasive voice, his eyes deeply on her, sure of himself with that sureness that no one had ever resisted, "But you can never do that now, you bird-of-paradise! You would only . . ."

He was brought up short by a change in her. This time his words had had the power to move her face from the quiet he hated. It was suddenly alive with a strong emotion. But what emotion? He could not guess at its meaning, nor why she should step quickly away, shaking his hands from her shoulders, and looking at him sadly, her eyebrows drawn up as if in pain. He hung uncertain, daunted by his inability to read her face, feeling for the first time an instantly dismissed doubt of his mastery over her.

She said very quickly, with the accent and manner of one who, shocked and pitying, tries to save another from going on with an involuntary disclosure in him of something shaming and unworthy.

"No, oh no! Not that. Neale has done nothing . . . said nothing . . . except as he always has, to leave me quite free, all free."

As he was silent for a moment, watchful, not especially moved by her words, which seemed to him unimportant, but alarmed by some special significance which they seemed to have for her, she went on with the single, only note of blame or reproach which was to come into her voice. "Oh, how could you think that?" she said to him, with a deep quavering disappointment, as though she were ashamed of him.

He knew that he was the cause of the disappointment, although he could not imagine why, and he regretted having made a false move; but he was not deeply concerned by this passage. He did not see how it could have any importance, or touch what lay at issue between them. These were all womanish, up-in-the-air passes and parries. He had only not yet found his opening.

He flung his head back impatiently. "If it is not that, what is it?" he demanded. "A return of hide-bound scruples about the children? You know that they must live their own lives, not yours, and that anything that gives you greater richness and power makes you a better mother."

"Oh yes, I know that," she answered. "I have thought of that, myself."

But he had a baffled feeling that this was not at all the admission the words would make it seem.

His impatience began to burn high, and a dawning alarm to translate itself into anger. He would not be played with, by any woman who ever lived! "Marise," he said roughly, "what under the sun is it?" In his tone was all his contemptuous dismissal of it, whatever it might be . . . outworn moral qualms, fear of the world's opinion, inertia, cowardice, hair-splitting scruples, or some morbid physical revulsion . . . there was not one of them which he knew he could not instantly pounce on and shake to rags.