“What do you mean?”
“There’d be only one thing that could prevent my letting you lend me the money.”
“Well, you certainly needn’t worry about paying it back.”
“It would take two or three years, but that could be managed now that Trenn and Harry want to give me an allowance. It isn’t that.”
Bella waited wondering.
“It is that I couldn’t take a great, great help from you, and go so far away, carrying anything in my heart that—that I’d kept hid—anything that concerned you.”
A quick fear leapt into Bella’s face.
“For one mightn’t come back, you know,” the other added.
“There’s only one thing we’ve never straightened out,” said Bella, “and that’s my tangle.”
“I have my share in the thing, I mean. But as I said, you couldn’t do now—what you did—when you were little.”