He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face, she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown woman's experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and present emotion.
All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She did not even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully. There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human being in pain.
He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent in the veil of life.
Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here, this way under the willow-tree."
They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, ". . . that was in 1763 and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men had learned during the French-and-Indian wars. Great-grandmother (she was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from their home in Connecticut. When the whole lot of them decided to settle here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is the tree it grew to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other old folks."
Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed just as young as ever."
"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and finer and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets more battered and feeble-looking."
Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a man who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot. He smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.