ath to answer the
clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran
through the Eagle Rock woods!

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

Marise knew what she was about to announce.

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

* * * * *

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

CHAPTER XXI

THE COUNSEL OF THE STARS

July 21. Night.

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

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

"Cousin Hetty! Cousin Hetty!"

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

"Oh, Cousin Hetty, it w