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." Agnes ran to get him another cup of cocoa and some more bread and butter. Marise leaned back on the sofa and watched him eat. * * * * * She was aware of a physical release from tension that was like a new birth. She looked at her husband as she had not looked at him for years. And yet she knew every line and hollow of that rugged face. What she seemed not to have seen before, was what had grown up little by little, the expression of his face, the expression which gave his presence its significance, the expression which he had not inherited like his features, but which his life had wrought out there. Before her very eyes there seemed still present the strange, alien look of the dead face upstairs, from which the expression had gone, and with it everything. That vision hung, a cold and solemn warning in her mind, and through it she looked at the living face before her and saw it as she had never done before. In the clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale's life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death by the mere possibility that it had not existed. She had been right in thinking that there was something there which would outlast the mere stars. He looked up, found her eyes on him, and smiled at her. She found the gentleness of his eyes so touching that she felt the tears mounting to her own. . . . But she winked them back. There had been enough foolishness from her, for one day.