ty'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