When Niel realizes that this is going on, he starts to see that the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Forrester that he loves is growing weaker. Niel does not like this, so he decides to help. When he decides to help, this is when Niel starts his climb up the tree. To help here, he decides to go to Mrs. Forrester's house one day and get there before Frank can come. On his way, he picks some roses, but when he got there, he heard Mrs. Forrester and Frank. With that, he went to the bridge and threw the flowers over the wire fence into a mud-hole.
"In that instant between stooping to the window-sill and rising, he had lost one of the most beautiful things in his life. Before the dew dried, the morning had been wrecked for him; and all subsequent mornings. This day saw the end of that admiration and loyalty that had been like a bloom on his existence. He could never recapture it. It was gone, like the morning freshness of the flowers" (71-2).
This was the first time that Niel actually did not like Mrs. Forrester. Niel goes on not liking the new Mrs. Forrester, but he keeps trying to help her because he wants her to be the way she was when he was a young boy. He has been caught up in his fantasy of what Mrs. Forrester's life should be like rather than accepting what it really is. This ties in with his feeling that the right man could still save her. However, Niel is not, nor every going to be, the type of man that could support a woman like Mrs. Forrester. Niel does not actually realize this until the end of the book when he sees Ivy Peters put his arm around Mrs. Forrester. This is when Niel gives up and "falls". He never actually saves either of them.
Ivy Peters is a bully throughout the novel. He always gets what he wants. At the beginning of the novel, Ivy spots a female woodpecker and shoots it down with a slingshot. He then grabs it once it wakes up. He does the same thing to Mrs. Forrester when he takes control of the marsh.
