“I knew she must be,” said Marise.  “She was here last night.  It was she, you know, who found Frank Warner’s body at the foot of . . . of course you’ve heard of that?”

Eugenia made a little wry face.  Of course she had heard of that, she said with an accent of distaste.  Everybody was talking about the melodramatic accident, as probably they would still be talking about it a hundred years from now, up here where nothing happened.  People had come all the way from North Ashley to look at the place, and some of the men and boys had gone around up to the top of the Eagle Rocks to see where Frank had lost his footing.  They found his surveyor’s compass still set upon its staff.  It was where the line ran very near the edge and Frank must have stepped over the cliff as he was sighting along it.  They could see torn leaves and stripped twigs as though he had tried to save himself as he fell.

She stopped speaking.  Marise found herself too sick and shaken to venture any comment.  There was rather a long silence, such as was natural and suitable under the circumstances, in that house.  Presently Marise broke this to ask if anyone knew how Frank’s mother had taken the news, although she knew of course Eugenia was the last person of whom to ask such a question.  As she expected, Eugenia had only lifted eyebrows, a faint slow shake of her head and a small graceful shrug of her shoulders, her usual formula for conveying her ignorance of common facts, and her indifference to that ignorance.

But Marise, looking at her, as they sat opposite each other in the twilight of the closely shuttered room, was struck by the fact that Eugenia did not seem wholly like herself.  Her outward aspect was the same, the usual exquisite exactitude of detail, every blond hair shining and in its place, the flawless perfection of her flesh as miraculous as ever, her tiny white shoe untouched by dust through which she must have walked to reach the house.  But there was something . . . in her eyes, perhaps . . . which now looked back at Marise with an expression which Marise did not understand or recognize.  If it had not been impossible to think it of Eugenia, Marise would have imagined that her eyes looked troubled, excited.  Was it possible that even in her safe ivory tower of aloofness from life, she had felt the jarring blow of the brutally immediate tragedy of the Eagle Rocks?  Or perhaps even Cousin Hetty’s disappearance . . . she had always hated reminders of death.

As Marise, surprised, looked at her and wondered thus passingly if she felt any reverberation from the tragedy-laden air about them, Eugenia’s face hardened back into its usual smooth calm; over the eyes that had been for an instant transparent and alive with troubled brightness, slid their acquired expression of benignant indifference.  She answered Marise’s faintly inquiring gaze by getting up as if to go, remarking in a clear low tone (she was the only person who had come into the house who had not succumbed to that foolish, instinctive muffling of the voice), “I forgot to give you a message from Neale.  He is obliged to be away today, on business, something about a deed to some wood-land.”