Ned and Ruth kissed each other?" she whispered
breathlessly, and flung her arms about him. Her lips, groping for his,
swept over his face, and he held her fast in a rapture of surprise.

"Good-bye-good-bye," she stammered, and kissed him again.

"Oh, Matt, I can't let you go!" broke from him in the same old cry.

She freed herself from his hold and he heard her sobbing. "Oh, I can't
go either!" she wailed.

"Matt! What'll we do? What'll we do?"

They clung to each other's hands like children, and her body shook with
desperate sobs.

Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five.

"Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried.

He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to
leave you now?"

"If I missed my train where'd I go?"

"Where are you going if you catch it?"

She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his.

"What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one
now?" he said.

She remained motionless, as if she had not heard him. Then she snatched
her hands from his, threw her arms about his neck, and pressed a sudden
drenched cheek against his face. "Ethan! Ethan! I want you to take me
down again!"

"Down where?"

"The coast. Right off," she panted. "So 't we'll never come up any
more."

"Matt! What on earth do you mean?"

She put her lips close against his ear to say: "Right into the big elm.
You said you could. So 't we'd never have to leave each other any more."

"Why, what are you talking of? You're crazy!"

"I'm not crazy; but I will be if I leave you."

"Oh, Matt, Matt--" he groaned.

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 yourself 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 knowing 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