“What’s the good of this! We’re off the trail. We’ll have to wait for the light. My God! How cold and wet and trembling you are.” He threw down his pack, took off his coat, wet only on the outside, and wrapped it closely about her. She felt that he parted branches for her, and she knew that they were in a dry, still, scented place whose walls stirred and breathed. She sank down beside him on the smooth pine-needles and crept close. They were giddy, beaten and confused; they felt each other’s trembling warmth; for greater comfort she tucked her hands under his arm. Her head dropped back against his shoulder so that her breath fell on his cheek. He felt the silent tears of her humiliation, hot and bitter and human after the cold, impersonal wetness of rain. It was as though a hand drew them together in the darkness; they moved numbly at the same instant, by the same impulse; then with a sort of convulsion they were in each other’s arms. Cold, wet, tremulous, their lips met. The night became the beating of a heart. CHAPTER XIV Hugh sat in his great carved chair, his hands laid out across the bulky arms, his head bent forward a little so that his eyes encompassed all the restless beauty of the fire. After nightfall, when the wind began to shake the cabin, he had built up the fire, and its light now fought ruddily against the whiteness of the moon. Hugh had not lighted his lamp, nor let Bella light it, but he told her to make some strong coffee and keep it hot on the stove. “When Sylvie comes in,” he had said, “she’ll be exhausted. We’ll give her a hot drink and send her to bed, eh, Bella! The foolish child!” This had been said softly, but with a wild, half-vacant look which Bella could not meet. It was her belief that Pete and Sylvie had gone, not to return that night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh’s face. But all day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first received her news of Sylvie’s disappearance, he had been alternately gay and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being his audience, he had talked. His talk was all of Sylvie, of her pretty childishness, her sweet, wayward ways, of her shyness, her timidity; and later, when supper was cleared away and he had throned himself in the center of that familiar circle of firelight, he had dropped his beautiful voice to a lower key and had boasted of Sylvie’s love for him. Bella sat on a big log sawed to the height of a low stool. She sat with her face bent down between her hands as though she were saving her eyes from the fire, but those bright, devoted eyes never left Hugh’s face, though sometimes they made of it but a blurred image set in the broken crystals of her tears.