He put his head a little to one side and contemplated her. "What do
you see when you look into the water-bucket, Bella?"

"The water-bucket?" She flushed. "Just because you caught me prinking
that once!"

"Well, if you had a mirror, what would you see in it, then?"

"An ugly old woman, Pete."

"There! Your mind's just the wrong-side-out of Hugh's. He won't see
himself ugly, and you won't see yourself pretty. I'm the only sane
fellow in this house."

"And you never in your life saw a pretty woman to remember her.
Besides, you're too young." She said it with a tart sweetness and
vanished into the kitchen.

With her departure Pete's whittling ceased, his hands fell slack and
he began to stare out through the snow-walled window. His anxiety
for Hugh slipped imperceptibly into a vague pondering over his own
youthfulness. That's what those two were always telling him, sometimes
savagely, sometimes tenderly! "You're too young." What did it mean
to him, anyhow, that he was "too young"? A desolation from which at
times he suffered in secret overcame him.

He was twenty-one or -two--or his memory lied. They had never
celebrated his birthdays, but he was five or six years old when Hugh
had been so suddenly, so unexplainably taken from the house, back