“Do you think men go so far, and walk through hell, to bring home a lie?”
Looking no longer at the orgy of color on the paper, but at the reflection of the actual scene in the dying face, “It was like the Day of Judgment,” said the girl.
“You can see that!” The craftsman’s pleasure in his handiwork brought out a gleam, and then, with a sudden passion, he tore the paper across and across, while Hildegarde cried out:
“Ah, don’t! Let me take it to—her!”
“Take it to the fire!—and leave the great legacy unencumbered. Fire, fire!” He was gathering up the splinters and shavings that he had whittled from the skee in the hours before Hildegarde’s coming. “Here! Here!”
A sense of impotency shackled her spirit as well as lamed her tongue. Blindly she took the fragments over to the embrasure of some blackened stones, just inside and to windward of the threshold.
“No one is about?”
“No one.”
“This is to start it, then.” He held out something. “This will catch easiest.”
“I have some thin paper here.” She twisted a wisp of her own map of the North, with a vague instinct of putting off an evil hour.