It was when she heard a loud insistent ringing in her head, and saw the stars waver and grow dim that she knew she was fainting away.

* * * * *

Then she was lying on the sofa in Cousin Hetty’s sitting-room, Neale bending over her, holding a handkerchief which smelled of ammonia, and Agnes, very white, saying in an agitated voice, “It’s because she hasn’t eaten a thing all day.  She wouldn’t touch her lunch or supper.  It’s been turrible to see her.”

Marise’s head felt quite clear and lucid now; her consciousness as if washed clean by its temporary absence from life.  She tried to sit up and smile at Neale and Agnes.  She had never fainted away in all her life before.  She felt very apologetic and weak.  And she felt herself in a queer, literal way another person.

Neale sat down by her now and put his arm around her.  His face was grave and solicitous, but not frightened, as Agnes was.  It was like Neale not to lose his head.  He said to Agnes, “Give me that cup of cocoa,” and when it came, he held it to Marise’s lips.  “Take a good swallow of that,” he said quietly.

Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused in her a keen sensation of hunger.  She drank eagerly, and taking in her hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began to eat it with a child’s appetite.  She was not ashamed or self-conscious in showing this before Neale.  One never needed to live up to any pose before Neale.  His mere presence in the room brought you back, she thought, to a sense of reality.  Sometimes if you had been particularly up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now.  But how profoundly alive it made you feel, Neale’s sense of things as they were.

The food was delicious.  She ate and drank unabashedly, finding it an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her.  When she finished, she leaned against Neale’s shoulder with a long breath.  For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort.

“Well, for Heaven’s sake!” said Neale, looking down at her.

“I know it,” she said.  “I’m an awful fool.”

“No, you’re not,” he contradicted.  “That’s what makes me so provoked with you now, going without eating since morning.”

Agnes put in, “It’s the suddenness of it that was such a shock.  It takes me just so, too, comes over me as I start to put a mouthful of food into my mouth.  I can’t get it down.  And you don’t know how lost I feel not to have Miss Hetty here to tell me what to eat.  I feel so gone!”

“You must go to bed this minute,” said Neale.  “I’ll go right back to the children.”

He remembered suddenly.  “By George, I haven’t had anything to eat since noon, myself.”  He gave Marise an apologetic glance.  “I guess I haven’t any stones to throw at your foolishness.”