"But, Tom, his eyes, I cannot bear to think of the look in his eyes. It—it was laughing, but it hurt." "Who cares about what he thought?" Tom was savage. "I do," Donelle whispered. She was putting her violin away. "I do. I couldn’t stand having a man look at me like that. Why, Tom, it made me feel ashamed." Again Gavot cursed, but under his breath. "You going?" he asked. "Wait, I’ll come with you. Wait, Donelle." But the girl did not pause. "I’d rather go alone," she called back. But she did not go directly home, she took a round-about way and reached the hill back of the little white house. The tall pines rose black from the untrodden snow, the winter sky was as blue as steel, and as cold. In among the trees, where it was sheltered, Donelle sat down. There she could think! The power of a look is mighty. The mere instant that Norval had gazed upon Donelle through the window was sufficient to carry the meaning in the man’s mind to the sensitive girl. It took her some time to translate the truth as she sat under the trees on the hilltop, but slowly it all became clear. "He does not know, but he thinks wrong of me." Donelle spoke aloud as if repeating a lesson. "Why should he think wrong?" questioned the hard teacher. Then Donelle remembered her father and Jo, and the word with which Pierre Gavot had polluted her life. "That’s why he laughed," shuddered the girl. Her own secret interpreting the hurting look though knowing him only as Richard Alton, she had no reason to believe he knew her story. Then the relentless teacher pointed her back to the look in Dan Kelly’s eyes, the look that had frightened her and had made Jo send her away to the Walled House. "Unless I save myself," moaned Donelle, "no one can keep people from looking—those looks!" Quietly she got up and walked down the hill, a tall, slim, ghostly form, with eyes haunted by knowledge. That night after the evening meal Norval stayed in the bright living room and tortured Donelle. He knew he was brutal, but something drove him on. He was suffering dumbly, suffering without cause, he believed. Why should he care that a girl about whom he knew too much should hide herself away with a rough young giant behind a locked door in a lonely hut? Then he concluded it was because he knew how Alice Lindsay and Law might feel, that he suffered. They would be so shocked. "After all," Norval tried to reason himself into indifference, "blood will cry out. The world may be damned unjust to women, but there is something lacking when a girl like this makes herself—cheap." Then it was that Norval began his torture. Jo was in the kitchen at the moment, Donelle was clearing the table. "Where were you this afternoon?" Norval was carefully filling his pipe, sitting astride his chair. "Part of the time I was in the woods on the hill," Donelle glanced at Jo through the open door.