"It's a good place to think things out,—and swear over 'em."
"What things, old man? You know I wouldn't tell. Nothing would tempt me to."
Osmond laughed a little.
"If you care so much as that, I'll tell you," he said, with a sudden harshness for himself in retrospect. "I go into the woods to think about life, my life, my difference from other fellows."
They sat down on the bench at the door, and a whippoorwill, calling, made the distance lonely. Peter had no answer for the truth he had evoked. It was too harsh. Only a woman could have met it, and that with kisses, not with words.
"Do you know," he said abruptly, "what all this makes me want?—this horrible excitement?"
"No, boy."
"It makes me want to paint. I want to paint everything I see: Markham MacLeod lying there in that bed of fern, Rose with all the life washed out of her, and you now, your face coming out of the dark. Everything's been unreal to me since it happened—except paint—and you."
"Poor old chap!" said Osmond. But he fled on from that concurrent sympathy to a dearer plea. "Paint, Pete," he urged. "Let all the rest go. Let MacLeod die. But you paint."
Peter was looking at him now, fascinated. The pale face out of the dark was all one glowing life. Peter wondered at him, his strength, his beauty. Again he felt as he had that morning, as if he had never known his brother, and as if it would pay for any pains to comprehend that pathetic and yet adventurous soul. Peter was more than half woman, with his quick perception of what went on in other minds. He understood, at that moment, that the great adventure of all is life itself: not, as it seemed to him, to paint, to love, but to taste all things with this richness that was beginning to be Osmond's, this hunger for the forbidden, even, so it was hunger. Osmond had begun to recognize his own nature, and for the first time his brother began to recognize him.