A hand gripped the quivering muscles and turned him about. Hugh had come up behind, without sound, on moccasined feet. His face was gray; his eyes were drawn into slits; his distorted mouth was trying to become a straight, hard line. The effort gave a twitch to the pale, lower lip. Sylvie stood up, singing as though in absent-minded idleness, and vanished into the house. It would have been difficult to tell whether or not she had heard Hugh’s arrival. “What’s the matter?” Pete stammered like a boy wakened from a dream to behold a lifted cane. “Let go my arm, Hugh. Your fingers cut.” “Come away from the house,” said Hugh coldly, tightening the iron grip as though Pete’s wincing gave him satisfaction. “Come up here by the pines. I want to talk to you.” “I’ll come,” said Pete. “Let go my arm.” There was that in his voice that compelled obedience. Hugh’s hand fell and knotted into a fist. Pete walked beside him up the abrupt slope of their hollow to the little hill above the river. Its noise was loud in the still, sunny air. There was no wind stirring. It was high noon. A sloping tent of shadow drooped from the pines and made a dark circle about their roots. In this transparent, purplish tent the brothers faced each other. Pete’s lips were tremulous, and Hugh’s distorted. “Now,” said Hugh, breathing irregularly and speaking very low, “I’ll tell you what I think of you.” “No, Hugh, don’t,” Pete pleaded. “You’ll say things you don’t mean--unkind things, terrible things. I don’t deserve it from you. You--you think that I--that I--” “Go on. Don’t stop. Tell me what I think--I think--that you--that you--” It was an unbearable moment, an impossible atmosphere, for the revelation of a first love. Pete felt stripped and shamed. “You think that I was telling Sylvie, that Sylvie--that I--” Hugh lifted his hand and struck. The younger man sprang back, then forward, and was at his elder’s throat. For an instant they struggled, silently, terribly, slipping on the red pine-needles. Then Pete gave a hard laugh. “Are we tigers?” he asked, and he pulled himself back and leaned, shaking, against a tree-trunk, gripping it with his hands. His blue eyes were cold and blazing in his white face, against which Hugh’s blow had made a mark. “You won’t strike me again,” Pete said. All boyishness was gone from his hard, level voice. “Go on. Say what you like. I’ll listen.” “You liar!” stormed Hugh. “You cheat!” Pete laughed again. A certain quality in his bitter self-control flicked Hugh. He tried to emulate the young man’s coolness. “I’ve trusted you,” he began again; “and behind my back you have been trying to win the love of the woman who has promised to be my wife.” “I have not.” “You were not making love to her there, then, when I came up behind you? When you were so excited that you didn’t hear me? when you were moving toward her--trembling all over? _I_ felt your arm!” Pete’s eyes dropped, then lifted as though under a great weight.