“Ah, not all day!  Not all day!” Marise kept the thought to herself.  She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to escape the unescapable.

An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. There was a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife; passionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence had not chilled down to . . .”

“Well, I guess I must be going now,” said Nelly in the speech of the valley.  She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound. . . .  As though a sound could reach Cousin Hetty now!

“I don’t like her biscuits,” said Agnes.  “She always puts too much sody in.”  She added, in what was evidently the expression of an old dislike, “And don’t she look a fool, a great hulking critter like her, wearing such shoes, teeterin’ along on them heels.”

“Oh well,” said Marise, vaguely, “it’s her idea of how to look pretty.”

“They must cost an awful sight too,” Agnes went on, scoldingly, “laced halfway up her leg that way.  And the Powerses as poor as Job’s turkey.  The money she puts into them shoes’d do ’em enough sight more good if ’twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I call it.”

She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door and walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious, lugubrious tip-toe step of the day.  It was Mr. Bayweather, his round old face rather pale.  “I’m shocked, unutterably shocked by this news,” he said, and indeed he looked badly shaken and scared.  It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had been of about his age.  He shook her hand and looked about for a chair.  “I came to see about which hymns you would like sung,” he said.  “Do you know if Miss Hetty had any favorites?” He broke off to say, “Mrs. Bayweather wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with me tonight to see if there was anything she could do.  But she was stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house.  Frank, it seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines in the woods somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to lunch.  He didn’t come then and hasn’t showed up at all yet.  Mrs. Warner wanted my wife to telephone up to North Ashley to see if he had perhaps gone there to spend the night with his aunt.  The line was busy of course, and Mrs. Bayweather was still trying to get them on the wire when I had to come away.  If she had no special favorites, I think that ’Lead, Kindly Light, Amid th’ Encircling Gloom’ is always suitable, don’t you?”

Something seemed to explode inside Marise’s mind, and like a resultant black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility loomed up, so darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to answer the clergyman’s question.  Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran through the Eagle Rock woods!