, and his eyes brooded upon her haggardly.

It was several days before Hugh regained his old vigor and buoyancy;
then it came to life like an Antaeus flung down to mother earth. His
hour of doubt, of self-distrust, of compunction, was whirled away like
an uprooted tree on the flood of his happiness. He flung reason and
caution to the four winds; he dared Bella or Pete to betray him, he
played his heroic part with boisterous energy; his tongue wagged like a
tipsy troubadour's. What an empty canvas, a palette piled with rainbow
tints, a fistful of clean brushes would be to an artist long starved for
his tools, such was Sylvie's mind to Hugh. She was darkness for him to
scrawl upon with light; she was the romantic ear to his romantic tongue;
she was the poet reader for his gorgeous imagery. He had not only the
happiness of the successful lover, but even more, the happiness of the
successful creator. What he was creating was the Hugh that might have
been.

With Sylvie clinging to his hand, he now went out singing--the three of
them together, great Hugh and happy artist Hugh all but welded into
one man for her and for her love. Those were splendid days, days of
fantastic happiness. Hugh's joy, his sense of freedom, gave him a
tenfold gift of fascination.

Yet one day--one of those dim, moist spring days more colorful to Hugh's
heart than any of his days--there cut into his consciousness like a
hard, thin edge, a sense of a little growing change in Sylvie. It had
been there--the change,--slightly, dimly there, ever since the sheriff's
visit. It was not that she doubted Hugh--such a suspicion would have
struck him instantly aware and awake--but that she had become in some
way uncertain of herself, restless, depressed, afraid. And it was always
his love-making that brought the reaction, a curious, delicate, inner
recoil, so delicate and slight, so deep beneath the threshold of her
consciousness, that in the blind glory of his self-intoxication he
missed it altogether--might, indeed, have gone on missing it, as she
would have gone on ignoring or repressing it, if it had not been for
their kiss on the mountain-top.

This was one of Hugh's madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and
show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had
been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always
under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half
the world and all the eyes o