* * * * *

Standing there, clad in the splendor of her physical maturity, Marise shivered uncontrollably again, and quaked and feared.  It was all a bad dream, all of it, and now as then Cousin Hetty lay safe and quiet, wrapped in sleep which was the only escape.  Marise turned sick with longing to go again, now, to seek out Cousin Hetty and to lie down by her to share that safe and cold and dreamless quiet.

She flung back over her shoulder the long shining dark braid which her fingers had been automatically twisting, and stood for a moment motionless.  She was suffering acutely, but the pain came from a source so deep, so confused, so inarticulate, that she could not name it, could not bring to bear on it any of the resources of her intelligence and will.  She could only bend under it as under a crushing burden, and suffer as an animal endures pain, dumbly, stupidly.

After a time a small knock sounded, and Agnes’s voice asked through the door if Miss Marise thought the door to . . . to . . . if the “other” door ought to be open or shut.  It was shut now.  What did people do as a general thing?

Marise opened her own door and looked down on the old figure in the straight, yellowed night-gown, the knotted, big-veined hand shielding the candle from the wandering summer breeze which blew an occasional silent, fragrant breath in from the open windows.

“I don’t know what people do as a rule,” she answered, and then asked, “How did Miss Hetty like best to have it, herself?”

“Oh, open, always.”

“We’d better open it, then.”

The old servant swayed before the closed door, the candlestick shaking in her hand.  She looked up at Marise timidly.  “You do it,” she said under her breath.

Marise felt a faint pitying scorn, stepped past Agnes, lifted the latch, and opened the door wide into the blackness of the other room.

The dense silence seemed to come out, coldly and softly.  For Marise it had the sweetness of a longed-for anaesthetic, it had the very odor of the dreamless quiet into which she longed to sink.  But Agnes shrank away, drew hastily closer to Marise, and whispered in a sudden panic, “Oh, don’t it scare you?  Aren’t you afraid to be here all alone, just you and me?  We’d ought to have had a man stay too.”

Marise tried to answer simply and kindly, “No, I’m not afraid.  It is only all that is left of dear Cousin Hetty.”  But the impatience and contemptuous surprise which she kept out of her words and voice were felt none the less by the old woman.  She drooped submissively as under a reproach.  “I know it’s foolish,” she murmured, “I know it’s foolish.”

She began again to weep, the tears filling her faded eyes and running quietly down her wrinkled old cheeks.  “You don’t know how gone I feel without her!” she mourned.  “I’d always had her to tell me what to do.  Thirty-five years now, every day, she’s been here to tell me what to do.  I can’t make it seem true, that it’s her lying in there.  Seems as though every minute she’d come in, stepping quick, the way she did.  And I fairly open my mouth to ask her, ‘Now Miss Hetty, what shall I do next?’ and then it all comes over me.”