y 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