hands.

Bella bent over him. "Poor Pete! It's cruel for you--and," she added
softly, uncertainly, "and for me."

"For you too, Bella?" He looked up at her through tears.

She nodded her head, and her face worked. "Perhaps you could take her
back to her friends, Pete?"

"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