Neale nothing to her?  She did not know what he was to her, but the mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death.  It was a thousand times worse than death, which was merely material.  This mattered a great deal more than the physical death of someone’s body . . . it was the murder, minute by minute, hour by hour, month by month, year by year of all her married life, of all she had found lovable and tolerable and beautiful and real in life.

Of course this could not be true . . . of course not . . . but if it were true, she would find the corrosive poison of a false double meaning in every remembered hour.  She did not believe any of those hideously marshaled facts, but if they were true, she would go back over all those recollections of their life together and kill them one by one, because every hour of her life had been founded on the most unthinking, the most absolute, the most recklessly certain trust in Neale.  To know that past in peril, which she had counted on as safe, more surely than on anything in life, so surely that she had almost dismissed it from her mind like a treasure laid away in a safe hiding-place . . . to know those memories in danger was a new torture that had never before been devised for any human being.  No one had the safe and consecrated past taken from him.  Its pricelessness shone on her with a blinding light.  What if it should be taken away, if she should find she had never had it, at all . . . ?

The idea was so acute an anguish to her that she startled herself by a cry of suffering.

Agnes’ voice behind her asked tremblingly, “Did you call me, Miss Marise?”

Marise shifted her position, drew a breath, and answered in a hard tone, “No.”

She knew with one corner of her mind that Agnes must be terrified.  What if she were?  Marise’s life-long habit of divining another’s need and ministering to it, vanished like a handful of dust in a storm.  What did she care about Agnes?  What did she care about anything in the world but that she should have back again what she had valued so little as to lose it from her mind altogether?  All of her own energy was strained in the bitterness of keeping her soul alive till Neale should come.  She had not the smallest atom of strength to care about the needs of anyone else.

She looked up at the stars, disdainful of them.  How small they were, how unimportant in the scheme of things, so much less able to give significance to the universe, than the presence of integrity in a human soul.

If she could have Neale back again, as she had always had him without thinking of it, if she could have her faith in him again, the skies might shrivel up like a scroll, but something eternal would remain in her life.

* * * * *

It seemed to her that she heard a faint sound in the distance, on the road, and her strength ran out of her like water.  She tried to stand up but could not.