I was silent. I felt I had no right to ask the question which rose in my mind.
"What do you think of Bella?" he asked suddenly.
He did not seem to realize that he was overstepping the bounds of good taste in asking me, a stranger, such a question, and I realized more than ever that he was only an impulsive boy, although he had reached man's estate. Indeed, in one sense, Hugh did not know what it was to be reserved, and yet in others he was strangely reticent.
I thought he seemed to be about to take me further into his confidence at this point, but, perhaps noting the non-committal nature of my reply, he desisted.
"Of course, she's a bundle of contradictions," he said; "but she's really splendid. Why, on the day after she'd—but, there, I mustn't tell you about that. Anyhow, there was an accident at Pendeen Mine. Two men were believed to be in danger of drowning by the flooding of the old workings. The miners had made every attempt—at least, so they said—to rescue them, and to do anything more would be to throw away their own lives."
"Yes," I said. "What then?"
"Bella went to them and talked to them as they had never been talked to before. She laughed all their protests to scorn, and when they proved to her that, humanly speaking, they had done all that men could do, she insisted upon going down the mine herself. It was the maddest thing a woman could do, and God only knows how she did it; but she rescued the miners. Why, it was in all the newspapers. Yes, Bella is magnificent, but—but——"
Hugh Lethbridge was silent for some time after this, neither did I speak. I was thinking of the impression she had made on me when I first saw her.
"She was never like other girls, even when she was a child," he went on. "She did not care for games—that is, ordinary children's games—so, although she is only two years older than I, we were never what you call playfellows. She is a very brainy girl, too, and by the time she was fourteen had read all sorts of out-of-the-way books."
"I wonder she did not go to Somerville or Girton when she left school."