you or Wilmer. Oh, I'll settle down, there's nothing else to do; I'll
marry him and get old before my time, like the others."

Calvin Stammark leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and stared at
her in shocked amazement--Hannah in every accent and feeling. The old
sense of danger and helplessness flooded him. He thought of Phebe with
her dyed hair and cigarette-stained lips, her stories of the stage and
life; he thought of Hannah dying alone and dog poor. Now Lucy----

"Do you remember anything about your mother," he asked, "and before you
came here?"

"Only that we were dreadfully unhappy," she replied. "There was a
boarding house with actresses washing their stockings in the rooms and
a landlady they were all afraid of. There was beer in the wash-stand
pitcher. But that wouldn't happen to me," she asserted; "I'd be
different. I might be an actress, but in dramas where my hair would be
down and everybody love me."

"You're going to marry Wilmer Deakon and be a proper happy wife!" he
declared, bringing his fist down on a hard palm. "Get this other
nonsense out of your head!"

Suddenly he was trembling at the old catastrophe reopened by Lucy. His
love for her, and his dread, choked him. She added nothing more, but
sat rigid and pale and rebellious. Before long she went in, but Calvin
stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for
the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting.

Damn the frogs!