“And leave Hugh? Didn’t you hear what he said, Bella? Life and death! It would kill him if she should go away with me. Or--he’d follow and kill me.” “Yes,” Bella assented somberly; “yes, he’d kill you. The devil is still living in his heart.” “No. Sylvie will marry him. Hugh gets his will.” Pete shook his head. “Wait a few days--you’ll see. She’s fighting against him now; I don’t know why--some instinct. But though he tells her so many lies, he doesn’t lie about one thing. He loves her. He does love her.” “No! No!” Bella’s passion, tearing its way through her long habit of repression, was almost terrifying. “He loves the image she has of him. If he knew that she could see him as I do, his love would shrivel up like a flower in a drought. Hugh can’t love the truth. He can’t love anything but his delusions. Pete, tell her the truth. For God’s sake, tell her the truth. Give her back her eyesight. Let her know his name, his story--his _face_!” “Don’t dare ask me, Bella!” “Why not?” She seemed to be out of breath, like a person who has been climbing in thin air. Her lips were dry. “Because--well, would you do it yourself?” “Ah! He would hate me, if I did. But you, Pete, when Sylvie loved you--and if she knew you, she would surely love you; any woman would--why, then you could bear Hugh’s hatred. I have only him--only him.” She locked her hands and lifted them to her forehead and was now making blind steps toward the kitchen door. Pete followed her, and turning her about, drew down the hands from her face. “Bella--_you_? Without saying a word? All these years?” Under the first pressure of sympathy that her agony had ever known, she could not speak. She bent her head for an instant against his arm, then moved away from him, groping through the kitchen door, back to her unutterable loneliness. Pete stood staring after her. A new Bella, this, not the cousin, the little cousin from the farm; not the nurse who had saved him from Hugh’s hardness and told him limping fairy tales and doctored his hurts; not the accepted necessity, but a woman--a woman young, yes, young. In the instant when he had glimpsed her face, broken and quivering, the tight lips parted and the hair disarranged about flushed, quivering cheeks, the eyes deep with widened pupils, she had revealed beauty and passion--the two halves of youth. How blind, how blind Hugh had been, blind and selfish and greedy, drinking up the woman’s heart, feeding upon her youth! CHAPTER XII “When you sit so silent, Pete,” Sylvie said softly, “I sometimes wonder if you’re not staring at me.” “When I’m making a trap,” he answered, smiling a little to himself and instinctively shifting his gaze, “I can’t very well be staring at you, can I?”