oulder,
looking into the startled old eyes, which grew a little quieter now that
someone else was there. What a pitiable creature Agnes' dependence on
Cousin Hetty had made of her.

Like the boom from a great bell came the thought, "That is what I wanted
Neale to make of me, when the crucial moment came, a dependent . . . but
he would not."

"What time did you say it is?" Agnes asked, still breathing quickly but
with a beginning of a return to her normal voice.

"Four o'clock," answered Marise gently, as to a child. "It must be
almost light outside. The last night when you have anything to fear is
over now."

She went to the window and opened the shutter. The ineffable sacred
pureness of another dawn came in, gray, tranquil, penetrating.

At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful
tears come to her eyes.

"See, Agnes," she said in an unsteady voice, "daylight has come. You can
look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid
of."

CHAPTER XXVI

MARISE LOOKS AND SEES WHAT IS THERE

_A Torch in a Living Tree_

July 24.

Not since his fiery, ungovernable youth had Vincent felt anything like
the splendid surge of rich desire and exultant certainty which sent him
forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise
turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these
three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had
been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been
frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for a great leap.

He felt himself taking the leap now, with such a furious, triumphant
sense of power released, that he came up beside her like a wind in the
forest, calling her name loudly, his hands outflung, his face glowing,
on fire with joy and his need for her.

For an instant he was dumfounded by the quiet face she turned on him, by
his instant perception of a profound change in her, by an expression in
her long dark eyes which was new to him, which he felt to be ominous to
him. But he was no untried boy to be cast down or disconcerted by sudden
alterations of mood in a woman. He was a man, with a man's trained
tenacity of purpose and experienced quickness of resource.

He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily
as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it,
whatever it was.

She did not seem tacitly