She had taken the biscuits out of the oven and was holding them suspiciously to her nose, when someone came in at the front door and walked down the hall with the hushed, self-conscious, lugubrious tip-toe step of the day. It was Mr. Bayweather, his round old face rather pale. "I'm shocked, unutterably shocked by this news," he said, and indeed he looked badly shaken and scared. It came to Marise that Cousin Hetty had been of about his age. He shook her hand and looked about for a chair. "I came to see about which hymns you would like sung," he said. "Do you know if Miss Hetty had any favorites?" He broke off to say, "Mrs. Bayweather wished me to be sure to excuse her to you for not coming with me tonight to see if there was anything she could do. But she was stopped by old Mrs. Warner, just as we were leaving the house. Frank, it seems, went off early this morning to survey some lines in the woods somewhere on the mountain, and was to be back to lunch. He didn't come then and hasn't showed up at all yet. Mrs. Warner wanted my wife to telephone up to North Ashley to see if he had perhaps gone there to spend the night with his aunt. The line was busy of course, and Mrs. Bayweather was still trying to get them on the wire when I had to come away. If she had no special favorites, I think that 'Lead, Kindly Light, Amid th' Encircling Gloom' is always suitable, don't you?"
Something seemed to explode inside Marise's mind, and like a resultant black cloud of smoke a huge and ominous possibility loomed up, so darkly, so unexpectedly, that she had no breath to answer the clergyman's question. Those lines Frank Warner had gone to survey ran through the Eagle Rock woods!
"Or would you think an Easter one, like 'The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Won,' more appropriate?" suggested Mr. Bayweather to her silence.
Agnes started. "Who's that come bursting into the kitchen?" she cried, turning towards the door.
It seemed to Marise, afterwards, that she had known at that moment who had come and what the tidings were.
Agnes started towards the door to open it. But it was flung open abruptly from the outside. Touclé stood there, her hat gone from her head, her rusty black clothes torn and disarranged.
Marise knew what she was about to announce.
She cried out to them, "Frank Warner has fallen off the Eagle Rocks. I found him there, at the bottom, half an hour ago, dead."