Finally, in her mental milling, Marcia reached Mahala, and her soul sickened over the things that people on the street were saying. By the hour she had handled Mahala’s little undergarments and wash dresses. She had mended the delicate laces and the embroideries that Elizabeth Spellman’s fingers had fashioned. Through the papers and Bluffport gossip, she had heard of the tragedy that had overtaken her. She had talked it over with Nancy, and she had said to her: “To save my life, I cannot believe that Mahala Spellman ever laid her fingers upon anything that did not belong to her. There must have been some reason, there must have been some plan on the part of the Morelands to ruin her. If there was property they could get by doing it, the wreck of a woman’s life would not stop them.” Now the motive was furnished. Albert Rich had not hesitated, when the crisis came, to tell people why Junior wanted to do anything that would hurt and humiliate Mahala. Finally, she reached Jason. She found herself saying aloud: “Jason was a good boy. If I had been permitted, I could have made life different for him.” Not knowing what the outcome of the trouble in Ashwater would be, Marcia felt that since the Morelands had come into the open and were doing terrible things to other people, her time would soon come. They would crush her as they had crushed Rebecca, Mahala and her mother, Mr. Spellman and the other men who had fallen into their power in a financial way—these other men who were raging up and down before the courthouse block in the main business square of the town, like blood-thirsty hyenas. It seemed to Marcia that in order to collect her thoughts, she must get away from people, she must go where her mind would not be diverted by what she was seeing and hearing on the streets. She had thought that she might find refuge in the office of Albert Rich, and she had gone there, but it was locked and when she inquired for him, she had been told that he was in the bank. No one knew what was happening there or when he could be seen. Then Marcia followed an impulse she could not define, did not realize that she was following. Her face turned to a familiar direction; her feet carried her on a well-known path. She went straight to the house in the outskirts where she and Jason had spent so many years together. The whole place had been changed. It was now comfortable. It was gay with paint; there was grass in the dooryard; there were flowers blooming in small round and square beds and lining the inside of the new fence. There was a carefully tended garden, but she could see no one and hear no one as she paced up and down before it. She thought that the people, who evidently were living happily there, must have been drawn down town by the excitement.