away."

"We are?" Hannah echoed him thinly, in bitter mockery. "I wouldn't have
you now if you were the last man on earth with the way you talked
about Phebe! I don't see how you can stand there and look at me. If I
told pa or Hosmer they would shoot you. You might as well know this as
well--I'm going back with her; it'll be some gayer than these lonely
old valleys or your house stuck away all by itself with nothing to see
but Senator Alderwith's steers."

There flashed into Calvin Stammark's mind the memory of how he had
planned to possess just such cattle for Hannah and himself; he saw in
the elusive lamplight the house he had built for Hannah. His feeling,
that a second before had been so acute, was numb. This, he thought, was
strange; a voice within echoed that he was going to lose her, to lose
Hannah; but he had no faculty capable of understanding such a calamity.

"Why, Hannah," he said impotently--"Hannah--" His vision blurred so
that he couldn't see her clearly; it was as if, indistinct before him,
she were already fading from his life. "I never went to hurt you," he
continued in a curious detachment from his suffering. "You were
everything I had."

Calvin grew awkward, confused in his mind and gestures. At the same
time Hannah's desirability increased immeasurably. Never in Greenstream
or any place else had he seen another like her; and he was about to
lose her, lose Hannah.

Automatically he repeated, "If Phebe were a man----"