Marise herself did not feel at all brave.  She sat down heavily in a chair by the window looking out at the man who for his wife’s sake was killing something vital and alive.  He had done that before, ’Gene had.  He went at it now with a furious haste which had something dreadful in it.

Nelly, who had sat down to rest on the pile of brush and poles, seemed a carved and painted statuette of ivory and gold.

She took off her ruffled pretty hat, and laid it down on the white-birch poles, so that she could tip her head far back and see the very top of the tree.  Her braids shone molten in the sunshine.  Her beautiful face was impassive, secreting behind a screen all that Marise was sure she must have been feeling.

’Gene, catching sight of her now, in a side-glance, stopped abruptly in the middle of a swing, and shouted to her to “get off that brush-pile.  That’s jus’ where I’m lottin’ on layin’ the tree.”

Somewhat startled, Nelly sprang up and moved around to the other side, back of him, although she called protestingly, “Gracious, you’re not near through yet!”

’Gene made no answer, returning to the fury of his assault on what he so much loved.  The great trunk now had a gaping raw gash in its side.  Nelly idled back of him, looking up at the tree, down at him.  What was she thinking about?

Marise wondered if someone with second-sight could have seen Frank Warner, there between the husband and wife?  ’Gene’s face was still gray in spite of the heat and his fierce exertion.  Glistening streams of perspiration ran down his cheeks.

What did the future hold for ’Gene?  What possible escape was there from the tragic net he had wrapped stranglingly around himself?

Very distantly, like something dreamed, it came to Marise that once for an instant the simple, violent solution had seemed the right one to her. Could she have thought that?

What a haunted house was the human heart, with phantoms from the long-dead past intruding their uninvited ghastly death’s-heads among the living.

The axe-strokes stopped; so suddenly that the ear went on hearing them, ghost-like, in the intense silence.  ’Gene stood upright, lifting his wet, gray face.  “She’s coming now,” he said.

Marise looked out, astonished.  To her eyes the tree stood as massively firm as she had ever seen it.  But ’Gene’s attitude was of strained, expectant certainty:  he stood near Nelly and as she looked up at the tree, he looked at her.  At that look Marise felt the cold perspiration on her own temples.

Nelly stepped sideways a little, tipping her head to see, and cried out, “Yes, I see it beginning to slant.  How slow it goes!

“It’ll go fast enough in a minute,” said ’Gene.

Of what followed, not an instant ever had for Marise the quality of reality.  It always remained for her a superb and hideous dream, something symbolical, glorious, and horrible which had taken place in her brain, not in the lives of human beings.