* * * * *

“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 was an awful dream this time.  Can’t I get into bed with you?”

“Why yes, come along, you silly child.”

The fumbling approach to the bed, the sheets held open, the kind old hand outstretched, and then the haven . . . her head on the same pillow with that of the brave old woman who was afraid of nothing, who drew her up close and safe and with comforting assurance instantly fell asleep again.  And then the delicious, slow fading of the terrors before the obliterating hand of sleep, the delicious slow sinking into forgetfulness of everything.