'A man did.' He laughed.
'Did she go young?'
'Yes, she died at nineteen.'
'And so'll it be with me!' she cried suddenly. 'So'll it be with me!
Dark and strong in the full of life.'
She flung herself on a faded blue settee and wept.
The impression of companionship—of whisperers breaking out, hands stretched forth, the steady magnetism of countless unseen eyes—was so strong that Hazel could not bear it, and even Reddin was glad to follow her back to the inhabited part of the house.
'This is the bedroom,' Reddin said, opening the door of a big room papered in faded grey, and full of the smell of bygone days. The great four-poster, draped with a chintz of roses on a black ground, awed her. Reddin opened a chest and took out the green dress. He watched her with an air of proud proprietorship as she put it on. She went down the shallow stairs like a leaf loosened from the tree.
Vessons, a beer-bottle in either hand, was so aghast at the pale apparition that he nearly dropped them.
'I thought it was a ghost,' he said—'a comfortless ghost.'
'So I be comfortless,' Hazel said to Reddin when Vessons had retired.
Her voice had a sound of tears in it, like a dark tide broken on rocks.
'And when I was comfortless at the Mountain Ed'ard was used to read
"Comfort ye, my people," as nice as nice.'