Agnes stood up, docilely submitting herself to the command, stopped crying, and went with Marise into the dim old room, in which nothing had been changed since the day, twenty years ago, when the furniture had been put back in place after Cousin Hetty’s old mother had lain there, for the last time.

The two women began to work, and almost at once Agnes was herself again, stepping about briskly, restored by the familiarity of being once more under the direction of another.  They pulled out the long haircloth sofa, moved the spindle-legged old chairs into the dining-room, and carried out one by one the drawers from the high-boy in the corner.  From one of these drawers a yellowed paper fell out.  Marise picked it up and glanced at it.  It was a letter dated 1851, the blank page of which had been used for a game of Consequences.  The foolish incoherencies lay there in the faded ink just as they had been read out, bringing with them the laughter of those people, so long dead now, who had written them down in that pointed, old-fashioned handwriting.  Marise stood looking at it while Agnes swept the other room.  Cousin Hetty had been ten years old in 1851, just as old as Paul was now.  Her mother had probably left something she wanted to do, to sit down and laugh with her little daughter over this trivial game.  A ghostly echo of that long-silent laughter fell faintly and coldly on her ear.  So soon gone.  Was it worth while to do it at all?  Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those children one tried to keep laughing, and then . . .

Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing.  People had been coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as though death had made it their own home.  Agnes came to the door, Marise looked up and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the second time she had been there.  “I come over again,” she said, “to bring you some hot biscuit and honey.  I knew you wouldn’t feel to do much cooking.”  She added, “I put the biscuits in the oven as I come through, so they’d keep warm.”

“Oh, thank you, Nelly, that’s very kind and thoughtful,” said Marise.  As she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman standing there, the richness of her vitality vibrating about her, she saw again the nightmare vision of ’Gene and heard the terrible breathing that had resounded in the Eagle Rock woods.  She was overwhelmed, as so often before in her life, by an amazement at the astounding difference between the aspect of things and what they really were.  She had never entirely outgrown the wildness of surprise which this always brought to her.  She and Nelly, looking at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot biscuits!

She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech in a play to Agnes’ conscientious country attempt to make conversation with the caller, “Hot today, ain’t it?  Yesterday’s storm didn’t seem to do much good.”  And to Nelly’s answer on the same note, “Yes, but it’s good for the corn to have it hot.  ’Gene’s been out cultivating his, all day long.”