"You promised me once that you would stay. I knew then that I needed you; every hour since that promise was made I've had a greater realization of my need for you until it ... it ..." Her breath caught in a sob and she pressed knuckles to her lips.
Beck stood silently watching her, a cold moisture forming on his brow, hands clenched as if he were holding himself against the urge of some great impulse.
"I felt when I stepped in there and learned what it all was, that the last thing I have to depend on was slipping away ... and I reached out and grasped you like I'd grasp a straw in a sea. It ... I can't tell you,"—her voice trembled, "what it meant, what it means to me...."
Words, words! They spilled from her lips with a rapidity that approached hysteria. She was talking without thought, without reason, letting her voice run on while her consciousness, divorced entirely from it, fell into chaos.
"Everything seems to be working against me and now, because you have been my help, my strength, they are trying to take you away. Oh, I need all the help there is, and that is you!"—with a stamp of the foot as she drove tears back.
"There are influences which I can't see, which I can only feel, all about me, within me,"—beating her breast—"and outside."
"It may be interestin' to you to know that I didn't shoot at any coyote."
She gasped lightly and for a moment did not speak.
"Then you did shoot at Hepburn?"—in a whisper.
"No, I didn't. I'd never shoot from cover."