to the fury of his assault on what he so
much loved. The great trunk now had a gaping raw gash in its side. Nelly
idled back of him, looking up at the tree, down at him. What was she
thinking about?

Marise wondered if someone with second-sight could have seen Frank
Warner, there between the husband and wife? 'Gene's face was still gray
in spite of the heat and his fierce exertion. Glistening streams of
perspiration ran down his cheeks.

What did the future hold for 'Gene? What possible escape was there from
the tragic net he had wrapped stranglingly around himself?

Very distantly, like something dreamed, it came to Marise that once for
an instant the simple, violent solution had seemed the right one to her.
_Could she have thought that?_

What a haunted house was the human heart, with phantoms from the
long-dead past intruding their uninvited ghastly death's-heads among the
living.

The axe-strokes stopped; so suddenly that the ear went on hearing them,
ghost-like, in the intense silence. 'Gene stood upright, lifting his
wet, gray face. "She's coming now," he said.

Marise looked out, astonished. To her eyes the tree stood as massively
firm as she had ever seen it. But 'Gene's attitude was of strained,
expectant certainty: he stood near Nelly and as she looked up at the
tree, he looked at her. At that look Marise felt the cold perspiration
on her own temples.

Nelly stepped sideways a little, tipping her head to see, and cried out,
"Yes, I see it beginning to slant. How _slow_ it goes!

"It'll go fast enough in a minute," said 'Gene.

Of what followed, not an instant ever had for Marise the quality of
reality. It always remained for her a superb and hideous dream,
something symbolical, glorious, and horrible which had taken place in
her brain, not in the lives of human beings.

* * * * *

Nelly, . . . looking down suddenly to see where the tree would fall,
crying out, "Oh, I left my hat where it'll . . ." and darting, light as a
feather, towards it.

'Gene, making a great futile gesture to stop her, as she passed him,
shouting at her, with a horrified glance up at the slowly leaning tree,
"Come back! Come back!"

Nelly on the brush-pile, her hat in her hand, whirling to return, supple
and swift, suddenly caught by the heel and flung headlong . . . up again
in an instant, and falling again, to her knees this time. Up once more
with a desperate haste, writhing and pulling