The vision vanished from Naomi’s eyes. She caught his arm, clutched it with the clinging fingers of a child who in sleep plunges from dreams into nightmare.
“Marshy—you wouldn’t do that! You couldn’t! Why, you called yourself my pal. Could pals stab one another like that? Could I think of harming you that way? Not for anybody! And that boy’s nothing to you. Nothing! Won’t you give me this chance? Just this one. If you knew what it means to me! Marshy, don’t turn away. Listen—please—please!”
But he kept his face turned determinedly from the pleading one streaked with tears, from the eyes he had so often smiled into when their mystery piqued and captivated him in idle moments. And in the rigid line of his jaw there was no yielding. He merely tried to tug away from her clinging fingers and a short phrase answered her.
[151]
] “Do you cry quits—or no?”
She steadied her lips. Her arms fell listlessly. But even as she met the question, it came less in the form he put it than in the thought of what Bill Dixon had come to mean to her. Not ease for herself, not insurance against bleak years ahead, not the road that led away from terror; but a boy’s hearty laugh and ardent eyes, the warm clasp of his hand, the strength of his arms, what it would mean to lose them. A light that lifted the weight of centuries shone through her lashes. A smile that trembled caught her lips.
“It isn’t quits, Marshy. No! Either way you win, so we might as well play to the finish.”
When he had gone, she sank on the couch and tears unlike the bitter ones of early dawn and hard noon streamed silently down her cheeks. They were tears of wonder and passionate regret, of gratitude that she, Naomi Stokes, could know this engulfing tenderness. The thing she had never dreamed might come was hers. She loved him. Nothing could take that away. After stumbling through the years, she had found in one brief month the dearest thing in the world. And now Marshy was going to snatch it from her. Was that his man’s right? No! She would fight him—the whole world—to keep that which had suddenly become her reason for being.
Yet she realized that she was not armed to fight, not Marshy, nor the world, nor truth. She, who had never lacked resources, to whom the game of life had been a game of wits, stood helpless now.
She could only wait.