"Back!" she said, lifting her lips scornfully away from touching the
word. "You remember that night in that little room on Peach Tree Street
when I prayed on my knees and kissed--your--shoes and crawled for your
mercy to stay for Marcia to be born? Well, if you were to lie on this
floor and kiss my shoes and crawl for my mercy I'd walk out on you the
way you walked out on me. If you don't go, I'll call a stage hand and
make you go. There's one coming down the corridor now and locking the
house. You go--or I'll call!"

His eyes, with their peculiar trick of solubility in his color scheme,
seemed all tan.

"I'll go," he said, looking slim and Southern, his imperturbability ever
so slightly unfrocked--"I'll go, but you're making a mistake, Hattie."

Fear kept clanging in her. Fire bells of it.

"Oh, but that's like you, Morton! Threats! But, thank God, nothing you
can do can harm me any more."

"I reckon she's considerable over sixteen now. Let's see--"

Fire bells. Fire bells.

"Come out with what you want, Morton, like a man! You're feeling
for something. Money? Now that your mother is dead and her fortune
squandered, you've come to harass me? That's it! I know you, like a
person who has been disfigured for life by burns knows fire. Well, I
won't pay!"

"Pay? Why, Hattie--I want you--back--"

She could have cried because, as she sat there blackly, she was sick
with his lie.

"I'd save a dog from you."

"Then save--her--from me."

The terrible had happened so quietly. Morton had not raised his voice;
scarcely his lips.

She closed the door then and sat down once more, but that which had
crouched out of their talk was unleashed now.

"That's just exactly what I intend to do."

"How?"

"By saving her sight or sound of you."

"You can't, Hattie."

"Why?"

"I've come back." There was a curve to his words that hooked into her
heart like forceps about a block of ice. But she outstared him, holding
her lips in the center of the comedy rim so that he could see how firm
their bite.

"Not to me."

"To her, then."

"Even you wouldn't be low enough to let her know--"

"Know what?"

"Facts."

"You mean she doesn't know?"

"Know! Know you for what you are and for what you made of me? I've
kept it something decent for her. Just the separation of husband and
wife--who couldn't agree. Incompatibility. I have not told her--" And
suddenly could have rammed her teeth into the tongue that had betrayed