ie nervously.

Hugh wet his lips with his tongue. "Nothing. The door creaked. Go on.
Tell me more, child," he urged.

"No. I want to hear about you now. Tell me your story."

Hugh clenched his hands and flushed darkly. He glanced over his shoulder
with a furtive look, but Bella had gone.

"No one else rightly knows my story, Sylvie. Will you promise me never
to speak of it, to Bella, to Pete, to any one?"

"Of course, I promise." Her face beamed with the pride of a child
entrusted with a secret.

Then, lowering his voice and moving closer to her chair, he began a
fictitious history, a history of persecuted and heroic innocence, of
reckless adventure, of daring self-sacrifice. The girl listened with
parted lips. Her cheeks glowed. And behind the door, Bella too listened,
straining her ears.

The murmur of Hugh's recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic
climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by
Sylvie's ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block,
colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what
she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the
kitchen and out into the snow.

There, in the broad light of the setting sun, Pete rhythmically bent and
straightened over his saw. The tool sang with a hissing, ringing rhythm,
and the young man drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and
back, forward and back, in alternate postures of untiring grace. The
air was not cold. There was the cloudy softness premonitory of a spring
storm; the sun glowed like a dying fire through a long, narrow rift in
the shrouded west. Pete had thrown aside his coat and drawn in his belt.
The collar of his flannel shirt was open and turned back; his head was
bare. The bright gold of his short hair, the scarlet of his cheeks,
the vivid blue of his brooding eyes, made shocks of color against the
prevailing whiteness. Even the indigo of his overalls and the dark gray
of his shirt stood out with a curious value of tint and texture. His
bare hands and forearms glowed. He was whistling with a boy's vigor and
a bird's sweetness.

Bella caught Pete's arm as it bent for one of the strong forward sweeps.
He stopped, let go of his saw, and turned to her, smiling.

Then--the smile gone: "What's wrong?"

Her eyes flamed in her pale, tense face. "We've got to stop it, Pete,"
she said. "It's horrible!"

"What? Don't stand out here with those ba