When Nina’s father dies, she turns almost automatically to Marsden as a kind of surrogate. Marsden, taking his cue from Darrell, suggests Evans as a possible husband, and Nina drowsily assents. Evans marries Nina realizing that she is not in love with him, but he lives in the hope that a child will bring them closer together. About seven months after she comes to live on the Evans homestead in northern New York State, Nina finds herself pregnant, but when she confides her condition to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans finds it necessary to reveal what she kept hidden even from her own son: Evans’s aunt, hopelessly insane, lives on the top floor of the old house, and Evans’s grandmother and her father before her both died in an asylum. Overwhelmed by the situation in which she finds herself, Nina...