Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and butter.  Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat.

* * * * *

She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new birth.  She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years.  And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face.  What she seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little, the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his features, but which his life had wrought out there.

Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with it everything.  That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind, and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as she had never done before.

In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale’s life.  That was Neale himself.  And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed.  She had been right in thinking that there was something there which would outlast the mere stars.

He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her.  She found the gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to her own. . . .  But she winked them back.  There had been enough foolishness from her, for one day.

Neale leaned back in his chair now, looked around for his; cap, took it up, and looked back at her, quietly, still smiling a little.  Marise thought, “Neale is as natural in his life as a very great actor is in his art.  Whatever he does, even to the most trifling gesture, is done with so great a simplicity that it makes people like me feel fussy and paltry.”

There was a moment’s silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather haggard and grim, giving himself a moment’s respite in his chair before standing up to go; Marise passive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents aimlessly from one to the other.

Then Agnes turned, and showed a shamed, nervous old face.  “I don’t know what’s got into me, Miss Marise, that I ain’t no good to myself nor anybody else.  I’m afraid to go back into the kitchen alone.”  She explained to Neale, “I never was in the house with a dead body before, Mr. Crittenden, and I act like a baby about it, scared to let Mrs. Crittenden out of my sight.  If I’m alone for a minute, seems ’sthough . . .”  She glanced over her shoulder fearfully and ended lamely, “Seems ’sthough I don’t know what might happen.”