She tightened her fierce hold about his neck. Her face lay close to his face.
"Ethan, where'll I go if I leave you? I don't know how to get along alone. You said so your- self just now. Nobody but you was ever good to me. And there'll be that strange girl in the house . . . and she'll sleep in my bed, where I used to lay nights and listen to hear you come up the stairs . . ."
The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the hated vision of the house he was going back to—of the stairs he would have to go up every night, of the woman who would wait for him there. And the sweetness of Mattie's avowal, the wild wonder of know- ing at last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to . . .
Her pleadings still came to him between short sobs, but he no longer heard what she was say- ing. Her hat had slipped back and he was strok- ing her hair. He wanted to get the feeling of it into his hand, so that it would sleep there like a seed in winter. Once he found her mouth again,
