looking at it
while Agnes swept the other room. Cousin Hetty had been ten years old in
1851, just as old as Paul was now. Her mother had probably left
something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her little
daughter over this trivial game. A ghostly echo of that long-silent
laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear. So soon gone. Was it worth
while to do it at all? Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those
children one tried to keep laughing, and then . . .

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

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

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

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

An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval
heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. _There_ was
a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife;
passionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence ha