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Show -10- adolescence, and did not try to interefere. Yet without them, he was alone, and held to her in a new and needful way. But she saw only threat in his embrace, and quickened her efforts. She painted the dining room, cleaned the draperies, made space in the attic for the table. She inquired into the cost of renting a hospital bed, and figured the amount into her monthly budget. She must face what was coming, she told herself again and again; preparation was everything. She told the children what to expect and how to stay calm, and she scratched the number of the rescue squad into the plastic surface of the telephone. Occasionally, at long intervals, she saw what she was doing, and wondered why she felt nothing but this, this resolve. She could not weep for him. She owed him compassion, she knew, for he was young and would die before his time, but instead of compassion there came a doleful image: herself in black, alone on a straightbacked chair, her nails ragged from boredom or grief, while her daughters stared into fatherless years with dull round eyes. "Traitor," she whispered. She fell ill with fear, and hid herself in a darkened room, away from the sun. She could talk to no one. He came and sat at the foot of her bed, stroked his broad hand across her brow, brought her the violets she had been growing on the windowsill of the kitchen. He could see that she was suffering, though he could not discover why, and he did what he could to help: he asked that she go back with him once again to the country inn, to stay with him in the room with the great oval mirror. A VC V /< /' |