“You—­have got the money!”

“So help me God, Selene!  You know, with the quarries shut down, what business has been.  You know how—­sometimes even to make ends meet it is a pinch.  You’re an ungrateful girl, Selene, to ask what I ain’t able to do for you.  A child like you, that’s been indulged, that I ’ain’t even asked ever in her life to help a day down in the store.  If I had the money, God knows you should be married in real lace, with the finest trousseau a girl ever had.  But I ’ain’t got the money—­I ’ain’t got the money.”

“You have got the money!  The book in gramaw’s drawer is seven hundred and forty.  I guess I ain’t blind.  I know a thing or two.”

“Why, Selene!  That’s gramaw’s—­to go back—­”

“You mean the bank-book’s hers?”

“That’s gramaw’s, to go back—­home on.  That’s the money for me to take gramaw and her wreaths back home on.”

“There you go—­talking luny.”

“Selene!”

“Well, I’d like to know what else you’d call it, kidding yourself along like that.”

“You—­”

“All right.  If you think gramaw, with her life all lived, comes first before me, with all my life to live—­all right!”

“Your poor old—­”

“It’s always been gramaw first in this house, anyway.  I couldn’t even have company since I’m grown up because the way she’s always allowed around.  Nobody can say I ain’t good to gramaw; Lester says it’s beautiful the way I am with her, remembering always to bring the newspapers and all, but just the same, I know when right’s right and wrong’s wrong.  If my life ain’t more important than gramaw’s, with hers all lived, all right.  Go ahead!”

“Selene, Selene, ain’t it coming to gramaw, after all her years’ hard work helping us that—­she should be entitled to go back with her wreaths for the graves?  Ain’t she entitled to die with that off her poor old mind?  You bad, ungrateful girl, you, it’s coming to a poor old woman that’s suffered as terrible as gramaw that I should find a way to take her back.”

“Take her back.  Where—­to jail?  To prison in Siberia herself—­”

“There’s a way—­”

“You know gramaw’s too old to take a trip like that.  You know in your own heart she won’t ever see that day.  Even before the war, much less now, there wasn’t a chance for her to get passports back there.  I don’t say it ain’t all right to kid her along, but when it comes to—­to keeping me out of the—­the biggest thing that can happen to a girl—­when gramaw wouldn’t know the difference if you keep showing her the bank-book—­it ain’t right.  That’s what it ain’t.  It ain’t right!”

In the smallest possible compass, Miss Coblenz crouched now upon the floor, head down somewhere in her knees, and her curving back racked with rising sobs.

“Selene—­but some day—­”