Mrs. Powers had gone finally, and the house was silent at last, so silent that she could now hear quite clearly, as though Eugenia still sat there, what the sweet musical voice was saying over and over.  Why had they gone away and left her alone to face this deadly peril which advanced on her step by step without mercy, time after time?  Now there was nothing to do but to wait and stand it off.

* * * * *

She was sitting in the same chair, her umbrella still in her hand, waiting, when Agnes came in to say that she had lunch ready.  She turned eyes of astonished anger and rebuke on her.  “I don’t want anything to eat,” she said in so strange a voice that Agnes crept back to the kitchen, shuffling and scared.

She was still sitting there, looking fixedly before her, and frowning, when Agnes came to the door to say timidly that the gentleman had come about using his car to meet the train, and wanted to know if he could see Mrs. Crittenden.

Marise looked at her, frowning, and shook her head.  But it was not until late that night that she understood the words that Agnes had spoken.

* * * * *

She was still sitting there, rigid, waiting, when Agnes brought in a lighted lamp, and Marise saw that evening had come.  The light was extremely disagreeable to her eyes.  She got up stiffly, and went outdoors to the porch, sitting down on the steps.

The stars were beginning to come out now.  The sight of them suggested something painful, some impression that belonged to that other world that had existed before this day, before she had conceived the possibility that Neale might not be Neale, might never have been Neale, that there was no such thing for her as human integrity.  Was it she who had leaned out from the window and felt herself despised by the height and vastness of the stars?  From the height and vastness of her need, she looked down on them now, and found them nothing, mere pin-pricks in the sky, compared to this towering doubt of her, this moral need which shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above the earth.  Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in righteousness of a human soul.

She had thought childishly, shallowly last night that she had had no faith, and could live with none.  That was because she had not conceived what it would be to try to live without faith, because she had not conceived that the very ground under her feet could give way.  At that very moment she had had a faith as boundless as the universe, and had forgotten it.  And now it was put in doubt.  She could not live without it.  It was the only vital thing for her.

Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no more, that he was nothing to her now?  It seemed to her at this moment that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she loved him or not; but she could not live without believing him.  That was all.  She could not live without that.  Life would be too utterly base . . .