“That’s the way saints usually run their business, isn’t it?” asked Neale.  “And I’d like to know how anybody’s going to keep him from doing it, if he decides he ought to.”

“Oh yes, we can,” urged Marise, sitting up with energy.  “We can, every one of us, throw ourselves against it, argue with him, tell him that it seems to us not only foolish, and exaggerated, and morbid, but conceited as if he thought what he did would count so very much.  We can make him feel that it would be sort of cheating the Company, after what they’ve done for him; we can just mass all our personalities against it, use moral suasion, get excited, work on his feelings . . . she has done that, that cousin!”

“I wouldn’t want to do that,” said Neale quietly.  “You can, if you think best.”

She recognized a familiar emergence of granite in his voice and aspect and cried out on it passionately, “Now, Neale!”

He knew perfectly well what this meant, without further words from her.  They looked at each other, an unspoken battle going on with extreme rapidity between them, over ground intimately familiar.  In the middle of this, she broke violently into words, quite sure that he would know at which point she took it up.  “You carry that idea to perfectly impossible lengths, Neale.  Don’t you ever admit that we ought to try to make other people act the way we think best, even when we know we’re right and they’re wrong?”

“Yes,” admitted her husband, “I should think we were bound to.  If we ever were sure we were right and they wrong.”

She gave the impression of vibrating with impatience and cried out, “That’s pettifogging.  Of course there are times when we are sure.  Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end of a poker?”

“A child is different,” he opposed her.  “All grown-ups are responsible for all children.  I suppose I’d keep him from taking hold of it.  And yet I’m not dead sure I’d be right.  If I thought he was only just going to touch it, to see if it really would burn him as people had told him, I guess I’d let him.”

“You always get around things,” she said blamingly, “but there are cases when you could be sure.  Suppose you saw Aunt Hetty just about to take poison, or Frank Warner getting Nelly Powers to run away with him?”

He was startled by this, and asked quickly with a change of tone, “Whatever made you think of that?  Are Frank and Nelly . . . ?”

“Oh, it just came into my head.  No, I haven’t heard anybody has said anything, noticed anything.  But I had a sort of notion that ’Gene doesn’t like Frank hanging around the house so much.”

“Well . . .” commented her husband, with a lively accent of surprise.  “I hadn’t dreamed of such a thing.  And it throws a light on something I happened to see this afternoon, on my way home.  I came round the back way, the ravine road below the Eagle Rocks.  I wanted to see about some popple we’re thinking of buying from the Warners, on the shoulder beyond the Rocks.  It didn’t occur to me, of course, that anybody else would be up there, but just at the peak of the shoulder I saw ’Gene Powers, lying down beside a big beech-tree.  He didn’t hear me, walking on the pine-needles.  And for a minute I stood there, and honestly didn’t know what to do.”