“You ain't goin' past, Richard?” Sylvia wailed out again. She flung out her lean arm farther towards him. Then she wavered. Barney thought she was going to fall, and he stepped forward and caught hold of her elbow. “I guess you don't feel well, do you, Miss Crane?” he said. “I guess you had better go into the house, hadn't you?”
“I feel—kind of—bad—I—thought you was goin'—past,” gasped Sylvia. Barney supported her awkwardly into the house. At times she leaned her whole trembling weight upon him, and then withdrew herself, all unnerved as she was, with the inborn maiden reticence which so many years had strengthened; once she pushed him from her, then drooped upon his arm again, and all the time she kept moaning, “I thought you was goin' right past, Richard, I thought you was goin' right past.”
And Barney kept repeating, “I guess you've made a mistake, Miss Crane”; but she did not heed him.
When they were inside the parlor he shifted her weight gently on to the sofa, and would have drawn off; but she clung to his arm, and it seemed to him that he was forced to sit down beside her or be rough with her. “I thought you was goin' right past, Richard,” she said again.
“I ain't Richard,” said Barney; but she did not seem to hear him. She looked straight in his face with a strange boldness, her body inclined towards him, her head thrown back. Her thin, faded cheeks were burning, her blue eyes eager, her lips twitching with pitiful smiles. The room was dim with candle-light, but everything in it was distinct, and Sylvia Crane, looking straight at Barney Thayer's face, saw the face of Richard Alger.
Suddenly Barney himself had a curious impression. The features of Richard Alger instead of his own seemed to look back at him from his own thoughts. He dashed his hand across his face with an impatient, bewildered motion, as if he brushed away unseen cobwebs, and stood up. “You have made—” he began again; but Sylvia interrupted him with a weak cry. “Set down here, set down here, jest a minute, if you don't want to kill me!” she wailed out, and she clutched at his sleeve and pulled him down, and before he knew what she was doing had shrunk close to him, and laid her head on his shoulder. She went on talking desperately in her weak voice—strained shrill octaves above her ordinary tone.
“I've had this—sofa ten years,” she said—“ten years, Richard—an' you never set with me on it before, an'—you'd been comin'—here a long while before that came betwixt us last spring, Richard. Ain't you forgiven me yet?”
Barney made no reply.
“Can't you put your arm around me jest once, Richard?” she went on. “You ain't never, an' you've been comin' here a long while. I've had this sofa ten years.”
Barney put his arm around her, seemingly with no volition of his own.