“Oh, _you_ couldn’t possibly.” (Had Bella really meant that she might lend—) “Even if there were any need of it, _you_ couldn’t go.” Hildegarde’s lips only were saying words, her mind was already faring away on an immense and wonderful journey, that she—_she_ was competent to undertake. “You aren’t the kind, anyway,” she wound up bluntly, coming back. “Nobody would think you were the kind either—nobody but me.” “Yes, yes. You’ve always understood that I wasn’t a bit like what people thought,” and, indeed, few who supposed they knew Hildegarde Mar but would have been surprised at the look in her face to-night, for once betraying not alone a passionate partizanship with her father’s stranded and embittered existence, but the glow that even the thought of “going to the rescue” may light in a generous heart, and reflect in the quietest face. “You could do anything you meant to,” said Bella, marveling a little at the new beauty in her friend, “anything. But this—you’d have to be very brave to go on such a—” “No, I wouldn’t. I _long_ to go.” No great surprise to Bella after all, this admission that Hildegarde, the reticent, the cold, was really burning with all sorts of eagerness that had never been suffered expression. But there was something more here to-night. Like many another, Hildegarde could have gone through hardship and suffering for the sake of any one she loved, but the look on her face as she sat there under the light, revealed the fact that this journey Bella shrank from even thinking of, that Hildegarde herself had called “appalling,” made yet its own strange appeal to the girl, apart from love of her father, independent of the joy of service. “You think if I did it, it would be because I’m brave and a good daughter, and things like that. No, it’s none of those things. It’s because, while other people have been going to New York and to Mexico, to London and to Paris, and—and—the farthest places, while they traveled north, south, east, west, I’ve sat here in this little house in Valdivia, and sewed and planted a garden and heard everybody else saying good-by, and listened to that woman over the way playing ‘Partant pour la Syrie,’ and have still stayed here, and sewed, and gardened, and only _heard_ about the world. I’ve done it long enough! I’m going to the North, too!” Hildegarde stood up with eyes that looked straight forward into space. A movement from the other seemed to bring the would-be traveler back. “If anybody will help me,” she said, turning her eyes on Bella’s face. The younger girl was on her feet. In the silence the two moved toward each other. Bella lifted her arms and threw them about Hildegarde’s neck. “I’ve told you I’ll help you.” “I love you very much already, but if you’d do that for me—” The shining eyes pieced out the broken phrase. Bella turned her graceful little head toward the dining-room door. Cheviot had raised his voice. But they couldn’t hear the words.