“Go back to bed, Bella; you’ll be worse.”
“You must come, too.”
Hildegarde made no answer.
“You can’t lie there with all these flowers in the room. I didn’t know you hadn’t set them out. The doors can’t be left open either.”
“The windows can.”
“I shan’t go unless you come, too.”
Hildegarde forced herself to get up. Bella put out the comforting light. But some things show plainer in the dark. Those symbols on the altar, they were only tendrils of smoke by day, or in the glare of gas. Now they were sparks of fire puncturing the blackness of the scented room. One fiery eye to watch over the fortunes of Nathaniel Mar, one to shine for Cheviot, and an unnamed third to pierce the darkness that shrouded the fate of that Other. Even when the two girls turned their backs, and groped their way to Bella’s room clinging hold of each other in the dark, the third spark not only shone before their inner vision still, it pricked each bosom with its point of fire.
What would happen when he came back?
Each wondered, and each held faster to the other with fear in the bottom of her heart.