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, the tight lips parted and the hair disarranged about
flushed, quivering cheeks, the eyes deep with widened pupils, she
had revealed beauty and passion--the two halves of youth.
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