Three days after her premonition, Hester meets the source of her dread when her brother, Squire Samuel Chatham, brings home Lady Evangeline, a beautiful widow he encountered in town. Evangeline plays the role of a delicate, genteel woman in need of help, and the Squire is immediately smitten. Hester, immune to her charms but acutely aware of the supernatural dread Evangeline radiates, observes her closely and notes an unsettling artificiality, as if her beauty were glued on like a doll's.

At dinner, Evangeline mentions her seventeen-year-old daughter who needs a new wardrobe. The Squire, charmed, invites Evangeline and her daughter to stay at the house while they wait on dressmakers. Hester, knowing she cannot leave her brother unprotected and that Evangeline cannot be easily refused, reluctantly agrees and expresses interest in meeting the daughter.

Meanwhile, Evangeline wakes Cordelia before dawn, jubilant about leaving town. She announces they are traveling to the coast to ensnare Squire Chatham into marriage. Cordelia packs her meager belongings, including a carved wooden horse from her only friend, Ellen.

Outside, Cordelia recognizes the cabriolet harnessed to Falada as belonging to Ellen's father, Mr. Parker. Evangeline coldly admits Parker was her longtime benefactor and that she used "force" to take the carriage, implying she has done something terrible to him. She also reveals Cordelia's father, whom Cordelia believed simply dead, met a similar fate that he "brought on himself." Wracked with guilt over Ellen and her father, Cordelia silently climbs into the carriage as her mother drives them toward Squire Chatham's home.