"Why should he think wrong?" questioned the hard teacher.
Then Donelle remembered her father and Jo, and the word with which Pierre Gavot had polluted her life.
"That's why he laughed," shuddered the girl. Her own secret interpreting the hurting look though knowing him only as Richard Alton, she had no reason to believe he knew her story.
Then the relentless teacher pointed her back to the look in Dan Kelly's eyes, the look that had frightened her and had made Jo send her away to the Walled House.
"Unless I save myself," moaned Donelle, "no one can keep people from looking—those looks!"
Quietly she got up and walked down the hill, a tall, slim, ghostly form, with eyes haunted by knowledge.
That night after the evening meal Norval stayed in the bright living room and tortured Donelle. He knew he was brutal, but something drove him on. He was suffering dumbly, suffering without cause, he believed. Why should he care that a girl about whom he knew too much should hide herself away with a rough young giant behind a locked door in a lonely hut?
Then he concluded it was because he knew how Alice Lindsay and Law might feel, that he suffered. They would be so shocked.
"After all," Norval tried to reason himself into indifference, "blood will cry out. The world may be damned unjust to women, but there is something lacking when a girl like this makes herself—cheap."
Then it was that Norval began his torture. Jo was in the kitchen at the moment, Donelle was clearing the table.