'I won'er you dunna see 'em, nights, watching you out of the black dark with their gold eyes, like kingcups, and the look in 'em of things dying hard. I won'er you dunna hear 'em screaming.'
His cause was lost, and he knew it, but he pleaded on.
'No. If I hadna swore by the Mountain I wouldna come,' she said.
'You've got blood on you.'
At that moment a neighbour passed and offered Hazel a lift. Now that she was marrying a minister, she had become a personality. Hazel climbed in and drove off, and Reddin's tragic moment died, as great fires die, into grey ash.
He went home heavily. His way lay past the parsonage where Edward and his mother slept peacefully. The white calm of unselfish love wrapped Edward, for he felt that he could make Hazel happy. As he fell asleep that night he thought:
'She was made for a minister's wife.'
Reddin, leaning heavily on the low wall, staring at the drunken tombstones and the quiet moon-silvered house, thought:
'She was made for me.'
Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was.
Many thoughts darkened Reddin's face as he stood there hour after hour in the cold May night. The rime whitened his broad shoulders as he leaned on the wall, and in the moonlight the sprinkling of white hairs at his temples shone out from the black as if to mock this young passion that had possessed him.