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Show - 1 1 - They went, and at once her terror eased. They looked out at the fields through the wide lace curtains. They washed in water from the antique pitcher. They made love in the shelter of the canopied bed. ."My beloved husband," she murmured as she lay in the wide reach of his arms, "we are together again." She clung to him, this sunblond man with the wrinkly laugh, who had walked so long beside her, who had waited so cheerfully on the road while she sat with her thoughts. Oh, how she had loved him, this carefree, mirthful man, for he had loved her sadness not with the sullen tolerance of ordinary men, but with something more: he had treasured the darkness in her, as she had needed his laugh. They had become one, perfect complements -- "Together, forever," she heard him saying: it was the word she had lost and it struck her like pain, tearing hersoul. "No!" she cried. "Dearest," he said, clasping her to him, "what is wrong? My wife, my love," and she yielded a moment, but her fear was greater, and she drew away from him, clutching the bedclothes around her, as if to hide from the wide oval eye of the mirror. "Look!" she cried at the mirror, "look at us!" But she did not understand that he could not see what she saw: their bodies abreast, hers thin, a widow's body, his bloated and dead, the horrid corpse of a laugh. She screamed at the mirror until he grew angry, and took her roughly away from their once-golden room. JU ~'- .A. |