He awoke, in the darkness, to the slight sound of the opening door, which, in the cramped room, was less than arm’s-length from the head of the bed. He did not stir. Lucille Christian — for he was sure it was she — moved into the room, and cautiously pushed the door shut behind her. ‘Perse,’ her voice said, in a dry whisper, ‘Perse.’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  She did not answer for a moment, then said, ‘I had to talk to you, Perse.’

  He pushed himself up on one arm, and peered toward her in the darkness. As his eyes strained toward her, desire welled up in him, possessing him like an exaltation. He stretched out his hand and took her wrist. The flesh was cool and firm under his fingers. He was aware of the small shafts of bone within it, and tightened his grip, pressing the flesh upon them. With a slow increase of force, he tried to draw her toward him. Her arm stretched out from her shoulder toward him, but lifelessly, limply, and heavily, as though it were the sodden end of a cut cable on which he pulled. She did not actively resist as he tried to draw her, but he sensed in her the recalcitrance of inertia, a sullen weight at which he was surprised, like a man who tries to pick up a familiar body and finds, suddenly, that in its unconsciousness, or death, it seems to have absorbed, already, something of the obstinate massiness of earth. He felt a flicker of fury, and with his free arm braced himself to exert his strength. Then, even in the dimness, he made out how her hand, below the wrist he clutched, hung limply and witheredly; and he felt the relaxed, unresisting tendons of the wrist. That momentary fury had left him, and the desire.

  He released his grip, suddenly, in midair, and her arm fell to her side like an inanimate object.

  He peered at her, then said, ‘You oughtn’t to have come in here.’

  ‘That wasn’t what you were thinking a minute ago,’ she observed.

  ‘You oughtn’t to have come,’ he replied sullenly.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘You oughtn’t. Sissie will know, and she’ll tell them.’

  ‘No,’ Lucille Christian said; ‘she’s asleep, sound as a child. She won’t know.’ Then she added, without irony: ‘I reckon I got a little practice going quietly. Last winter, you know.’

  ‘We could have talked tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ Lucille Christian answered, ‘not tomorrow. Not tomorrow, if I was going to say what I had to say. I had to tonight. I had to come in here, and say it, now. I might have gone away tomorrow, and not said it, and then been wondering all my life how things would have been if I had said it.’ She stood in the middle of the little room. In the instant after she stopped speaking, he was conscious again of the distant, devouring insistence of the sound the insects were making off yonder, in the dark, in the trees by the lane.

  He let himself sink down again, in the bed. He took his eyes away from her, and lay on his back, and stared upward at the indistinguishable ceiling.

  Then she said, ‘Light the lamp.’

  He pushed himself up. ‘They’ll see,’ he remonstrated.

  ‘No,’ she answered, ‘they won’t see.’

  He swung himself to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed, and groped for his overalls, which hung over the foot of the bed. He put them on, then sat down again on the bed. ‘They’ll see,’ he repeated.

  ‘No,’ she told him, ‘you can turn it down low. But I want the light, even a little. To talk by. You know, we’ve never talked, not really talked, you and me, in the light. It was always when I couldn’t really see you. Your face. I’ve thought of that sometimes, and I’ve felt all at once like I didn’t know you.’ She paused. Then: ‘Have you?’

  He made no answer.

  ‘Light the lamp,’ she directed.

  He got up, fumbled in the pocket of his overalls for a match, and moved gropingly toward the shelf where the lamp was. His bare feet made no sound on the boards of the floor. He struck the match, shielding the flame with his hand, and his shadow swayed amorphously behind him on the walls and ceiling, while he applied the flame to the wick. It took, flaringly; then he put the chimney on, and turned down the wick until only a little worm of flame clung uncertainly to the exposed edge.

  He returned to the bed, and sat upon it, watching her.

  ‘Don’t you want to sit down?’ he asked.

  She sat in the single chair, a cane-bottom chair, which stood against the wall opposite the bed. Under the dark skirt of her dress, he could see her bare feet set side by side, straight, on the floor. He noticed, detachedly, how high and strongly curved the arches were.

  She sat very erect in the chair, with her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘You can see me now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking at him. Then: ‘I had to come in here, now, to talk to you. Doctor MacDonald didn’t send me, like I said.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Mr. Munn said, not so much in question as in echo.

  ‘No, I asked him where you were, and he told me. I wanted to talk to you. I had something to say to you. But when you first came in tonight, and I saw you come through that door, I felt I couldn’t say it. I felt I didn’t know you. You didn’t look the way I remembered.’

  Mr. Munn raised his hand, and meditatively fingered his beard. ‘I reckon not,’ he remarked. ‘Not with all this beard.’

  ‘It wasn’t that,’ she told him. ‘It was you. I felt I couldn’t tell you what I’d come to say. I’d have gone back right away, tonight, if there’d been a way. Then lying in there, in bed, I couldn’t sleep. That child was lying there asleep by me, and every breath she drew, I thought how long it had been since I slept like that.’ She stopped, and her gaze withdrew from him and fixed upon the small, crawling flame on the lampwick.

  He sat with his elbows on his spread knees, his forearms hanging loose between them, and waited.

  As though by an effort, she resumed, still watching the flame: ‘I thought if I didn’t get up and talk to you now, I might never. I might look at you in the morning, and you’d be the way you were tonight when you came through that door, and I’d go away, and never say it.’

  In the pause she looked at him interrogatively, but her folded hands were motionless in her lap, and she was erect. His face showed nothing.

  ‘My father ——’ she began, and stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘Dead?’ he repeated. ‘You said — out there, tonight ——’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know. I couldn’t say it then. Not that way, and you sitting there. He died three days ago. And was buried yesterday.’

  He straightened up, slipping his feet on the floor with a faint, dry, rustling sound. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not,’ she answered. ‘Not with him that way. Lying there, that way. Staring, and his breath coming that way, making that noise. All the time, day and night. No’ — and she spoke almost with vehemence, and her hands slowly knotted in her lap — ‘I’m not sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, as though he had not heard.

  ‘I didn’t come to tell you that,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he demanded, and sank forward again, with his elbows on his knees.

  ‘I’m going away,’ she said. Her hands were quiet now, again folded, and her voice was not much more than a whisper. ‘I haven’t decided where, but I’m going. I can’t stay any longer. Not here. There’s no reason.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe St. Louis,’ she said; then added, ‘but God knows there’s no reason for me to go back there.’

  ‘Your aunt; she’s there, isn’t she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t see her’ — and the vehemence came back to her voice, which was, however, steady — ‘not if she was burning in hell. She’s — she’s a bitch. You don’t know.’

  ‘No. I didn’t know.’

  ‘A complete bitch. She’s papa’s sister, a lot younger than he was. She was his sister, but she was ashamed of him. She’d married a man named Allbright, who went up there and made a little money, and all — but maybe you know ——’

  ‘I knew he was rich,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘Just that.’

  ‘And when my mother died she took me. Just to have something on papa, she was like that. And somebody to boss. And when Allbright died, she took everything out on me. And she fooled around with men, and before he died, too.’

  ‘She sounds pretty,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘She was a bitch. And I ——’ She paused, moodily studying his face. Then, suddenly, she said: ‘I’m not just telling you all this. It’s part of what I wanted to tell you. It’s the only way I can think of to tell you ——’

  ‘All right,’ he answered.

  ‘We never talked any,’ she said. ‘Not like other people. What we were to each other, it was all closed up, shut in. It was cut off from everything else, everything we had been. From part of what we were, even then.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘My aunt was a bitch. And I — I guess I was too. There was a fellow ——’

  ‘There’s no reason to tell me,’ Mr. Munn said, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘He taught in a riding school. He was wonderful on a horse. He was an Englishman, and he’d been in the English army, he said. He was awful. He thought he was so good-looking, and a lady-killer, and all. He was so awful, I reckon that was why I began to notice him. Just his being so awful. I’d get out and see him now and then. He was afraid of my aunt. He was afraid of everything, I reckon. Except horses. He wasn’t afraid of the worst one. Or any kind of jump. For a while I thought I might run off with him, just because it looked like the only thing to do. And I asked him. But he was afraid. So I told him how awful he was. Everything, and how he wasn’t fit to wipe your foot on, and how if there hadn’t been something wrong with me I’d never have looked at him. Then he cried, not because I was quitting him, but because I knew what he was like inside. I told him some day a horse would guess what he was like inside, and would kill him.’

  She stopped and looked across the room at him. He was lying back on the bed, on his back, with his arms under his head. He gave no sign that he had noticed the cessation of her voice.

  ‘A horse killed him,’ she said. ‘Threw him and killed him. I read it in the paper, after I came back here. I didn’t even recognize his name at first, everything seemed so different then.’ She paused, as though searching her mind. ‘His name was Emory Chivers,’ she said. Then: ‘Why I’m telling you ——’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘Now.’

  ‘It was different when I got home,’ she resumed, ignoring him. ‘With papa. It was all right then. I didn’t think much about anything. I was just wrapped up in being a sort of way I’d never been, not since I was a little girl. It was even all right when Benton Todd started to come around ——’

  ‘You ought to have married him,’ Mr. Munn said, still looking at the shadowy ceiling.

  ‘He was a child,’ she returned. ‘Nothing but a child.’

  ‘If you’d married him, he’d be here, today,’ he declared. Then added, with a distant and judicial tone: ‘Alive.’

  ‘You’ve got no right to say that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Alive.’

  ‘Nobody can say; there’s nothing to say about a thing like that,’ she rejoined. Her hands moved again in her lap, folding and unfolding, then stopped. ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘So’s that English fellow,’ he reminded her, ‘that Chivers.’ She made no answer, and for a little while he seemed sunk in meditation before he said, ‘You told him what he was.’

  ‘He was that way, nobody made him that way ——’

  ‘Benton Todd,’ Mr. Munn interrupted, still meditatively, ‘he did what he thought you wanted him to do.’

  ‘And you,’ she retorted. ‘He thought you were wonderful, he wanted to be like you.’

  He lay there, ignoring her words. ‘He was a fool,’ he said then.

  Suddenly she leaned forward in her chair, and thrust her arms out at him, the hands lifted and bent upward at the wrists, in a gesture of protest, saying: ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s over. I came here to tell you something ——’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going away,’ she replied, speaking hurriedly, and her hands subsided to her lap, delayedly as though sinking through a depth of water. ‘Somewhere away from here. I oughtn’t ever have come here. Ever. But I’m going away. You said you wanted to marry me. You can go away. You ought to. I can marry you now; we’ll go away, and get married sometime and be together.’ Her gaze left him, returning to the insufficient flame of the lamp. ‘That was what I came here to say,’ she concluded.

  After her voice stopped, the night sounds seemed to creep back into the room, gradually and as though timidly returning, the sound of the insects and the scarcely discernible sound of the leaves moving in the bushes near the house, for a little wind had begun.

  ‘There was a time,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘when I could have done it. A long time back.’

  ‘I knew you would say that,’ she answered, her voice a whisper.

  ‘I didn’t know it,’ he admitted, ‘until I said it.’

  ‘I knew it when I saw you tonight. When you came through that door. But I had to tell you what I’d come to tell you. I owed it to myself. I had to.’

  ‘I owe it to myself,’ he told her, ‘to stay here.’

  ‘No,’ she said, and leaned toward him again, ‘you don’t. It’s not that we’ — and she hesitated, still leaning and looking at him as though to draw his averted face toward her before she said — ‘that we love each other. Whatever it is, that’s not the word.’

  ‘Love, it’s not anything,’ he replied; ‘not when it’s not a part of something else.’

  ‘I couldn’t say I love anything. Not now. I’m just cold inside.’ Then she sat up straight, and exclaimed suddenly: ‘Cold. I’ve always been cold. That’s it, cold. That’s why I did what I did, came to you. I was cold; I thought you’d warm me. That’s the way about those others. There was something made me think they weren’t cold inside; they were warm, I thought. Even Chivers, what he could do with horses. And you ——’

  ‘And me ——’ he repeated, not questioningly, but in a slow dubiety.

  ‘You, you, I thought — I must have felt’ — her words came rushingly, no longer in whisper — ‘I thought you must be warm, after what you’d done, after that.’ Her voice sank, all at once, to a whisper. ‘To do that you’d have to be warm, have to feel about something. To kill a man.’

  ‘You knew’ — he said distantly — ‘about Trevelyan?’

  ‘Benton told me. I got it out of him. That’s why I came to you, to warm me. But you ——’

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘You are cold, too. Whatever you did, you were cold. Like me, inside. Whatever you did, even this man at the trial, this Turpin ——’

  ‘Turpin!’ he exclaimed, stiffening, almost rising. ‘Turpin! I didn’t ——’

  But her voice was going on: ‘Whatever you did, you did because you were cold, because you wanted to be warm.’

  He sank back, slowly relaxing again.

  ‘Because you wanted to be warm,’ she said, ‘because you wanted to get through to something to make you warm. Because you were cold ——’

  ‘I did what I did,’ he returned.

  ‘You wanted to be warm. Like some other people. Like my father was. He was, he had it inside himself. That’s why he could live by himself all those years, and a big, strong man like that. Why he could be the way he was. Why, you don’t know — why, he had a picture of my mother on a table in his room, and he’d look at it every night — I’ve seen him, when he didn’t know — and talk to it sometimes, just say a little something that didn’t mean anything, like to somebody around the house. You’d never guess that, would you?’ She paused, regarding him. Then she demanded, ‘Now, would you?’

  ‘No,’ he replied.

  ‘Nobody would,’ she said. ‘But that’s why, and I’d see him and hear him, and lie awake and want to be like that. And then ——’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you,’ she finished. She rose from the chair, but did not move away from it. The faint light struck at an angle upward across her face. ‘But it wasn’t any use,’ she said then. ‘I thought it was, at first. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘It’s too bad,’ he rejoined.

  ‘You needn’t feel sorry for me,’ she told him; then added bitterly: ‘I don’t for you. There’s others worse. Tolliver ——’

  ‘Tolliver,’ he repeated, ‘Tolliver; I hadn’t thought of him in a long time.’

  ‘Tolliver, talking to people all his life, crowds, never being anything except when his voice was talking to crowds; if he had anything in him, any life, sucking it out of crowds, talking. Crowds and women. Never being anything except when he thought somebody else thought he was something. Just that ——’

  ‘The bastard,’ Mr. Munn declared, without warmth.

  ‘— like sucking blood, living off something else. That’s why he was always after women, not even because he wanted them.’

  ‘The bastard,’ Mr. Munn said again. He rose to a sitting position on the bed, and swung his legs over the side to the floor.

  ‘That’s why he was after me. I know; I could tell.’

  Mr. Munn shifted himself, and looked up at her. ‘You?’ he asked.