He began, “But, dear, why do you care so much about it?  You can’t understand about what I did, if I don’t tell you this part, the beginning, how I . . .”  Then, feeling her begin to tremble uncontrollably, he said hastily, “Why, of course, Marise, if you want to know the end first.  The upshot of it all is that I’ve got it straightened out, about the Powers woodlot.  I got track of those missing leaves from the Ashley Town Records.  They really were carried away by that uncle of yours.  I found them up in Canada.  I had a certified copy and tracing made of them.  It’s been a long complicated business, and the things only came in yesterday’s mail, after you’d been called over here.  But I’d been in correspondence with Lowder, and when I had my proofs in hand, I telephoned him and made him come over yesterday afternoon.  It was one of the biggest satisfactions I ever expect to have, when I shoved those papers under his nose and watched him curl up.  Then I took him back today, myself, to his own office, not to let him out of my sight, till it was all settled.  There was a great deal more to it . . . two or three hours of fight.  I bluffed some, about action by the bar-association, disbarment, a possible indictment for perjury, and seemed to hit a weak spot.  And finally I saw him with my own eyes burn up that fake warranty-deed.  And that’s all there is to that.  Just as soon as we can get this certified copy admitted and entered on our Town Records, ’Gene can have possession of his own wood-land.  Isn’t that good news?”

He paused and added with a tired, tolerant, kindly accent, “Now Nelly will have fourteen pairs of new shoes, each laced higher up than the others, and I won’t be the one to grudge them to her.”

He waited for a comment and, when none came, went on doggedly making talk in that resolutely natural tone of his.  “Now that you know the end, and that it all came out right, you ought to listen to some details, for they are queer.  The missing pages weren’t in that first town I struck at all.  Nothing there but a record of a family of Simmonses who had come from Ashley in 1778.  They had . . .”

Marise heard nothing more of what he said, although his voice went on with words the meaning of which she could not grasp.  It did not seem to her that she had really understood with the whole of her brain anything he had said, or that she had been able to take in the significance of it.  She could think of nothing but a frightening sensation all over her body, as though the life were ebbing out of it.  Every nerve and fiber in her seemed to have gone slack, beyond anything she had ever conceived.  She could feel herself more and more unstrung and loosened like a violin string let down and down.  The throbbing ache in her throat was gone.  Everything was gone.  She sat helpless and felt it slip away, till somewhere in the center of her body this ebbing of strength had run so far that it was a terrifying pain, like the approach of death.  She was in a physical panic of alarm, but unable to make a sound, to turn her head.