She sat silent, her broad, dusty feet in their elastic-sided, worn, run-over shoes straight before her, the thick, horny eyelids dropped over her eyes, her scarred old face carved into innumerable deep lines.  Marise wondered if she had forgotten that anyone else was there.  She turned her own eyes away, finally, and looking at the mountains saw that black thunderclouds were rolling up over the Eagle Rocks.  Then the old woman said, her eyes still dropped, “I tell you how my uncle told me, seventy-five years ago.  He said people are like fish in an underground brook, in a black cave.  He said there is a place, away far off from where they live, where there is a crack in the rock.  If they went ’way off they could get a glimpse of what daylight is.  And about once in so often they need to swim there and look out at the daylight.  If they don’t, they lose their eyesight from always being in the dark.  He said that a lot of Indians don’t care whether they lose their eyesight or not, so long’s they can go on eating and swimming around.  But good Indians do.  He said that as far as he could make out, none of the white people care.  He said maybe they’ve lost their eyes altogether.”

Without a move of her sagging, unlovely old body, she turned her deep black eyes on the flushed, quivering, beautiful woman beside her.  “That’s where I go,” she answered.  “I go ’way off to be by myself, and get a glimpse of what daylight is.”

She got up to her feet, shifted her reticule from one hand to the other, and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.

Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain, and disappear.  Her own heart was burning as she looked.  Nobody would help her in her need.  Toucle went away to find peace, and left her in the black cave.  Neale stood. . . .

A child’s shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for “Mother!  Mother! Mother!” sent her back running breathlessly to the house.  Mark had fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck him, he said, “in the eye! in the eye!” He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye.  This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball.  Those swing-boards were deadly.  Marise snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, “It’s probably nothing,” and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.

She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water.  Then she tried in vain to induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow had struck.

But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with frantic tenseness over the hurt eye.  Marise could feel all his little body, quivering and taut.  His shrieks were like those of someone undergoing the most violent torture.