And how intelligent she was! How curiously well informed! But Bella was always surprising you.
“I keep thinking about him in the night. I lie awake wondering if he’s cold,” Hildegarde confessed, and Bella, why, to look at her face you’d think she knew all about that lying awake and wondering—did the same herself. “Father does so love a fire. Don’t you remember when all of us would be baking he used to draw closer to the hearth?”
“That was only because he lived so much indoors. He’ll be quite warm in that beautiful furry sleeping-bag. He’ll probably sleep better than he’s done since he was a child. They all do.”
“Who do?”
“Oh—a—people who—go to the Klondike.”
Another time, “I am haunted by the certainty that he didn’t take enough provisions. Trenn says that in intense cold people eat a great deal more than—”
“That’s true,” said Bella sagely, “but it’ll be all right. People are very good to one another in such out-of-the-way places. They always share with anybody who runs short.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, that’s what the accounts all say.”
“What accounts?”