“Bella!” Hildegarde dropped her hand and sat back. “Would you?”
Instead of answering, “I wouldn’t dare to go myself,” Bella said.
“Oh, you couldn’t possibly.” (Had Bella really meant that she might lend—) “Even if there were any need of it, you couldn’t go.” Hildegarde’s lips only were saying words, her mind was already faring away on an immense and wonderful journey, that she—she was competent to undertake. “You aren’t the kind, anyway,” she wound up bluntly, coming back.
“Nobody would think you were the kind either—nobody but me.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve always understood that I wasn’t a bit like what people thought,” and, indeed, few who supposed they knew Hildegarde Mar but would have been surprised at the look in her face to-night, for once betraying not alone a passionate partizanship with her father’s stranded and embittered existence, but the glow that even the thought of “going to the rescue” may light in a generous heart, and reflect in the quietest face.
“You could do anything you meant to,” said Bella, marveling a little at the new beauty in her friend, “anything. But this—you’d have to be very brave to go on such a—”
“No, I wouldn’t. I long to go.”
No great surprise to Bella after all, this admission that Hildegarde, the reticent, the cold, was really burning with all sorts of eagerness that had never been suffered expression.
But there was something more here to-night. Like many another, Hildegarde could have gone through hardship and suffering for the sake of any one she loved, but the look on her face as she sat there under the light, revealed the fact that this journey Bella shrank from even thinking of, that Hildegarde herself had called “appalling,” made yet its own strange appeal to the girl, apart from love of her father, independent of the joy of service.