Pete and Bella made room for them silently about the hearth where Pete
had already built up a fire. Sylvie groped her way to the throne from
which the other woman slipped half furtively and so noiselessly that
Sylvie never guessed her usurpation.

"Hugh is going to tell us a story," she said, and rested her head back
so that her small chin pointed out and her slim neck was drawn up--"a
wonderful story about the river and a bear. I hope it's a baby bear,
Hugh, for you know how I feel about bears. I honestly think that being
so afraid of seeing them is what made me blind!" She gave her small, shy
laugh. "I thought I saw them everywhere I looked that day and night. It
seems so long ago now, and yet it is not so many weeks. I can still hear
Hugh's voice calling out to me across the snow. And now," she said, "the
snow's all gone and none of you are strangers any more, and--Go on with
your story, Hugh."

Pete added a log to the fire so that the flames stretched up bravely
and made a great fan of light against which they all seemed painted
like ornamental figures, Hugh lounging along the rug to make a striking
central figure. Bella was drawn up rigidly on a stiff, hard chair; she
hemmed a long, coarse towel with her blunt, work-roughened fingers.

Pete sat opposite Sylvie on the floor, his back against the corner of
the fireplace, his knees drawn up in his hands, his head a little bent.
He too--from under his long level brows--looked for the most part at
Hugh, not devotedly, not wistfully, but with a somber wondering. It was
only now and then, and as though he couldn't help it, that the blue,
smouldering Northern eyes were turned to Sylvie on her throne. Then they
would brighten painfully, and his lips would tighten so that the dimple,
meant for laughter, cut itself like a touch of pain into his cheek. The
firelight heightened his picturesqueness--the dull blue of his shirt,
open at the round, smooth throat, the dark gold-brown of his corduroy
trousers, against which the long, tanned hands, knit strongly together,
stood out in the rosy, leaping light--beautifully painted against the
background of old brown logs.

Yet it was Hugh, after all, who dominated the room by right of his
power, his magnetism, the very distortion of his spirit. Here in this
lonely square of light and warmth, surrounded by a world of savage,
lawless winds heightening the voices of vast loneliness, these three
people were imprisoned by him, a Merlin of