She shrank away from him mentally; and looking at him, filtered by moonlight, she saw that he was old and although the aspen leaf that fell between them was still green, she knew that it was old and dead, too, and the grass under her left hand, though green, was dying. Terror filled her, and as a very small child, she had been in a dark room, somewhere, and there was rain and lightning; her father had come to hold her hand; she could remember his saying: "You won't die for a long time," although how he had come to say it, she could not remember. Ever since, she had, in the back of her mind, the thought: I'm dying now. And late at night, very often, she would awake with icy sweat on her body to realize that some day there would actually come that last minute, as real as the present one, and how could she stand it? "... the house," he finished; but she did not know what he had said. "We don't have to get married," she said. "Why not? I don't see why not?" Her lips were trembling, and she wanted to cry. "Don't you see: I don't _want_ to." "I don't understand you," he said. "I don't understand you at all." The moonlight patterned the ground. "Look," he said. "We want to hurry and grow up, don't we? We want...." Scarcely understanding, herself, she repeated, "We don't have to get married!" Her mouth was dry, and her hand, hot in his. Doggedly, Clyde said, "I don't understand you, Margy." * * * * * She laughed tiredly, for he was gone, and it was almost too late, now. "Don't be serious. Tonight, don't be serious. Let's not talk any more about that. I don't want to talk about that." "We've _got to_," he insisted. "We've got to learn to be serious. We can't go on like a couple of kids like this forever." "There's ... there's a lot of time, yet. We've got so much time ... before we...." She wondered how the thought had almost crept into words, and she shuddered, while from across the lake, a tree frog began to chirp eerily. "I'm afraid to think about dying," she said, and it was the most important thing in the world to make him understand that. "Dying worries me. I don't want to have to die." Her voice went on evenly, monotonously, in chorus with the tree frog, and her hand clamped his wetly, but she hardly listened to the words herself, because she knew that he did not understand what she was saying. "But I don't have to think about it. There's so much time left. And I want to stay young like this. Don't you understand, Clyde? I thought you said you understood me? I don't want to be sick and hurt. I want things to be simple and ... pretty. Pretty. Can't you see that, Clyde? I don't care about anything else." "You don't believe that," he said. After a pause (while the wind quieted), she said, insistently, "I do. Yes, I _do_, Clyde ... I really do." He tried to release her hand.