“I’ll ride as far as I dare with you,” said Pearse, alert, concerned, but all in the dark. “I wish we could have had more of a visit together.”
“Oh!” Hilda turned on him tear-blinded, angry eyes, “you needn’t bother to come any further. I can just play with youngsters, I suppose!” She lifted the rein and was off at a gallop, and she never looked back to see how he took that blow.
She didn’t look back. She wouldn’t look back. But, after the first, she went very slowly. Any one who’d wanted to could have overtaken her in a minute. Almost walking her pony that way made her late. Supper was over. She went in, head down, moving with dragging steps. She felt beaten and bruised; sunburned till she was almost in a fever. To these things she was more or less accustomed; a night of sound sleep would put them right; but the wounds of that interview with Pearse were new and terrifying; the sting of chagrin that it had left upon the face of her spirit was intolerable. That parting cut she had aimed at him was, by some cruel magic, cleaving her own heart now. It ached and bled. How could she ever bear it?
She washed up, stumbled into Sam Kee’s kitchen and sat down at his little table to eat the supper he had saved for her. The old Chinaman turned from the stove, where he was stirring something, intending to give her one of his grumbling scoldings. When he saw how worsted she looked, how she sipped at her coffee and ate almost nothing, he went instead and fetched a little dish of lemon jelly from the pantry, saying, more in sympathy than reproach:
“Sam Kee tell you blue horse debbil. Tell you he kill you.”
“I had to ride him,” murmured Hilda absently.
Oh, it hurt dreadfully to be angry at Pearse—to feel bitter toward him. If she had a chance to talk with him now—only for a minute—only a minute—she would put her pride in her pocket and make it all right at any cost.
She shoved the lemon jelly away; then, catching Sam Kee’s crestfallen look, drew it back and ate a little of it.
“That’s all, Sam,” she said, trying to smile. “Can’t eat any more now. Too tired. Go to bed now.”
But as she was on her way to the stair’s foot, Hank’s voice called to her from the office: