‘You’m talking soft now!’ ‘I’m frightened, Abner . . . frightened!’ ‘You’ve no need to be while I’m here. I can look after myself and you too. I’m going to see old George and tell him straight. You may like it or lump it. That’s my way.’ She wept, inconsolable. She would not let him comfort her. She hoped that her tears would soften him. ‘Can’t you do just one thing for me, Abner? You’re cruel . . . cruel! You don’t love me. That isn’t love.’ ‘I’ve got to do it my own way.’ ‘You might just as well kill me.’ ‘I’ve never run away from a man yet.’ ‘If you don’t take me away from here now,’ she said desperately, ‘you’ll never have me at all. Never! I know it, Abner, it’s our last chance.’ ‘It’s been too much for you,’ he said. ‘You can’t see anything clear. I’m not a chap that changes.’ She stared at him in silence with sad, resentful eyes. Then she lost control of herself and began to curse the clumsiness of old Drew, who had blundered in on them with his drunken gossip in the middle of the night. ‘I’ll never forgive him!’ she cried. ‘Never!’ She shouted like a drunken woman. Then she stopped and listened intently, just as an animal listens in suspicion. Morgan, awakened by the sound of raised voices, had begun to cry. ‘It’s Morgan,’ she whispered. ‘You’d better go to him,’ Abner replied. She put her hands to her face. ‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Abner, don’t! You’re driving me!’ ‘Go on!’ he said roughly. ‘I’ll put the light out. Got the matches?’ She saw that he meant it, and blindly went. Slowly, methodically, Abner locked the kitchen door and put out the light. A moment later he himself went upstairs in the dark. Morgan was still sobbing, mechanically, for the sake of hearing his own voice, and as Abner passed the door he was aware of a soft moaning which told him that Mary was crying too. His heart ached, his body yearned for her; but in his brain George Malpas’s words re-echoed: ‘By God, you’re the only pal I’ve got that I can trust!’ In a day or two George would be home, and then the situation must be faced. He could not be a man and run away from it.