“Now,” said Hugh, breathing irregularly and speaking very low, “I’ll tell you what I think of you.”
“No, Hugh, don’t,” Pete pleaded. “You’ll say things you don’t mean—unkind things, terrible things. I don’t deserve it from you. You—you think that I—that I—”
“Go on. Don’t stop. Tell me what I think—I think—that you—that you—”
It was an unbearable moment, an impossible atmosphere, for the revelation of a first love. Pete felt stripped and shamed.
“You think that I was telling Sylvie, that Sylvie—that I—”
Hugh lifted his hand and struck. The younger man sprang back, then forward, and was at his elder’s throat. For an instant they struggled, silently, terribly, slipping on the red pine-needles. Then Pete gave a hard laugh. “Are we tigers?” he asked, and he pulled himself back and leaned, shaking, against a tree-trunk, gripping it with his hands. His blue eyes were cold and blazing in his white face, against which Hugh’s blow had made a mark. “You won’t strike me again,” Pete said. All boyishness was gone from his hard, level voice. “Go on. Say what you like. I’ll listen.”
“You liar!” stormed Hugh. “You cheat!”
Pete laughed again.
A certain quality in his bitter self-control flicked Hugh. He tried to emulate the young man’s coolness.
“I’ve trusted you,” he began again; “and behind my back you have been trying to win the love of the woman who has promised to be my wife.”