Marise, immobile in her chair, repeated, “It wasn’t Lowder.  You didn’t say it was Lowder.”

“Yes, it was Lowder,” said Eugenia clearly.  “And now you speak of it once more, I remember one more thing about their talk although I didn’t try to understand much of it.  It was all connected with the Powers family.  It was their woodlot which this Mr. Lowder had bought for Neale.  I was surprised to know that they had ever had any wood-land.  They have always seemed too sordidly poverty-stricken.  But it seems this was the only way Neale could get hold of it, because they refused to sell otherwise.”

She looked again at Marise, a long, steady, and entirely opaque gaze which Marise returned mutely, incapable of uttering a word.  She had the feeling of leaning with all her weight against an inner-door that must be kept shut.

“Did Neale tell you this man had secured the Powers woodlot for him, for Neale, for our mill?” she heard her voice asking, faint in the distance, far off from where she had flung herself against that door.

“Why yes, why not?  Not very recently he said, some time ago.  We had quite a talk about it afterwards.  It must be something you’ve forgotten,” said Eugenia.  She took up a card from the table and fanned herself as she spoke, her eyes not quitting Marise’s face.  “It’s going to be as hot as it was yesterday,” she said with resignation.  “Doesn’t it make you long for a dusky, high-ceilinged Roman room with a cool, red-tiled floor, and somebody out in the street shouting through your closed shutters, ‘Ricotta!  Ricotta!’” she asked lightly.

Marise looked at her blankly.  She wished she could lean forward and touch Eugenia to make sure she was really standing there.  What was it she had been saying?  She could not have understood a word of it.  It was impossible that it should be what it seemed to mean,—­impossible!

A door somewhere in the house opened and shut, and steps approached.  The two women turned their eyes towards the hall-door.  Old Mrs. Powers walked in unceremoniously, her gingham dress dusty, her lean face deeply flushed by the heat, a tin pan in her hands, covered with a blue-and-white checked cloth.

“I thought maybe you’d relish some fresh doughnuts as well as anything,” she said briskly, with no preliminary of greeting.

Something about the atmosphere of the room struck her oddly for all the composed faces and quiet postures of the two occupants.  She brought out as near an apology for intruding, as her phraseless upbringing would permit her.  “I didn’t see Agnes in the kitchen as I come through, so I come right along, to find somebody,” she said, a little abashed.

Marise was incapable of speaking to her, but she made a silent gesture of thanks, and, moving forward, took the pan from the older woman’s hand.

Mrs. Powers went on, “If ’twouldn’t bother you, could you put them in your jar now, and let me take the pan back with me?  We hain’t got any too many dishes, you know.”