enden, 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 tho