As a long-legged girl of twelve she had stayed there once with her mother for several days before going home for the holidays.

She felt like a wounded animal, and her one desire was to drag herself into a quiet place to die.
It seemed to her then, under the first stupendous shock of finding that Marty was with that girl, that death was the next certain thing.

Day after day and night after night, cut to the quick, she waited for it to lay its cold hand upon her and snuff her out like a tired candle, whose little light was meaningless in a brutal world.

Marty, even Marty, was no longer a knight, and she had put him into broadcloth.
Not in the sun, but in the shadow of a chestnut all big with bloom, her days had passed in lonely suffering.

Death was in the village, that was certain.