She wondered, too, what Pat would think if she told her of Tommy. Thomasina, the girl whose devotion had filled all the days of Hazel's young childhood. Tommy, the two years older tomboy whose quiet strength had protected Hazel from teasing boys and spiteful girls. Tommy sho was always her sympathetic confidant and helpful friend. And finally when they were in their teens, whose attachment had seemed naturally, of its own accord to ripen into and demand the fulfillment of love.

How strange that the very naturalness of their devotion had turned their parent's adjoining homes into armed enemy camps Hazel still couldn't understand her mother's revulsion when she discovered her daughter had a "crush" on the older girl next door. But the memory of her mother's bitter denunciati of Tommy, and the angry words that ensued between the two families still had the power to tear agonizingly through Hazel's mind.

Later Tommy's family had moved away without allowing the girls even to say goodbye. The family pastor had come to pray with Hazel and her parents to exorcise the "wicked and evil" thing that had come into their lives. Perhaps it was that, more than anything else, that had fastened the horrible scars of shame and guilt across Hazel's heart so that never again could she think of love and tenderness without the dreadful remembered sensation of guilty fear.

If only both sets of parents had been less dramatic about it...had treated it as a normal crush perhaps a reasonable adjustment could have been reached later by Hazel. But their super-dramatics only served to freeze her emotionally into the very pattern her parents feared.

And then again, if only they hadn't made such an issue of things when she met Jim some months later, things might have fallen naturally into a different pattern for her. She might have been able, if they'd let her alone, to respond to the attraction he felt for her, and have fallen in love with him. But, inevitably, as soon as her mother knew that Jim was interested, she began her openly obvious campaign to see that Hazel married him.

" her

"Now is your chance to make something of yourself,' mother nagged. "You're just too young to realize what

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