He caught her in his clasp, fiercely.
“You will!”
“I’ve got to——”
“You promise?”
“Good heavens, yes!” she looked up at him, laughing.
Suddenly her eyes filled. She tore his arms away and took him to her breast in a fiercer, closer clasp. Then the long tension broke with her cry:
“Barry—Barry,” she breathed brokenly, “you belong to me—you’re my boy! You’re all I ever owned in all my life that really belonged to me.... I—I had a—a heifer”—she was laughing hysterically—“but I had to sell her—and they kept the money....”
She clung to him, strained him to her in an abandon of long-pent need, incoherent between convulsive tears and the sobbing laughter that shook her slender body:
“You want me, you need me, don’t you, Barry? You’re lonely. No boy ever should be lonely. It is the wickedest thing in the world—that any child should ever be lonely for need of love.... You are a child! Mine! You’re all I care about.... And I’m going to marry you because you want me to—because we both want to—Barry, my darling—my boy who belongs to me——”