“Do you know that we’ll be very late?” he said. “It will be midnight before we can possibly make it back to the cabin, if you can even do it at all. You’ll have to spend the night somewhere at the station. What will they think? They will be anxious, Bella and Hugh.”
“But what can they think?” Her cheeks were unexplainably scarlet. “If I choose to trust you to take care of me, why should they grumble? And I won’t have to spend the night. You don’t know how strong I am. I’m very strong. I don’t feel tired. We’ll go back by moonlight. There’s a beautiful moon.”
“It will be almost morning.” He made a reckless gesture. “Well, it’s too late to think of that now. Come on.”
He threw himself down the bank, held up his hands to catch hers, and swung her down beside him. The sun slanted warmly along the road and just ahead flickered the blue ripples of a lake.
Sylvie moved quickly and easily beside him, barely touching his arm with her hand. She seemed definitely to decide to put away her childishness. She treated him as though she had forgotten his supposed youth; she talked straightforwardly, with a certain dignity, about her childhood, about her amusing and pitiful experience as a third-rate little actress, and she asked him a question now and then half diffidently, which he answered in stumbling, careful speech, always weighed upon by his promise, by the deception he must practice, by the dread of what must come. Nevertheless, minute by minute, his pulse quickened. This, God be thanked, would mean the end. The insufferable knot of circumstance, so fantastic, so extravagantly unlivable and unreal, would break, Hugh would tear the tangle of his making to tatters with angry hands when they got back. His difficult trust in Pete’s promise would go down under the strain of these long and unexplained hours of Sylvie’s absence in his company. It was the last act in the extravaganza, queer and painful, that had twisted them all out of their real shapes for the confusion of a blind waif. This adventure that Sylvie’s impatience had planned would bring down the curtain. After all, no matter what came of it, Pete was glad. The color warmed his face; his blue eyes deepened; he smiled down at Sylvie beside him. For this hour she seemed to belong to him rightfully, naturally, by her own will. He let go of his inhibitions and resigned himself to Fate.
When, on the far shore of the lake, the low walls of the trading-station came in sight, a double image, reflected faithfully with the strip of sand at its door, the low, level wall of pines behind and the blue, still sky above, Pete caught the girl’s hand in his.
“Here we are, Sylvie,” he said. “Keep quiet and follow my lead. Remember, now, that I am supposed to be your husband and you my wife. Can you play that part?”
She nodded, bending down her face so that he saw only the tip of her small, sunburnt chin. She was hatless; the sun struck blue, bright lines in her black hair.
“I’ll be careful, Pete.”
She pressed his hand, and he returned the pressure.