Scott shut his teeth, although he nodded shortly. He had not enjoyed the three-day frost between himself and Catie; but he was sure that, in the final end, he had been in the right of it, even if he had been a little unceremonious in pressing the matter home on her attention. Moreover, his will had triumphed; Catie had been the one, not he, to break the silence. The casualness of her "Hullo!" that morning, had not deceived him in the least. He was perfectly well aware that she had lain in wait for his passing, her eye glued to the crack of the front-window curtains. The victory was his. He could afford to yield the minor point concerning manners, when he stood so firmly entrenched upon that other point which concerned the ministry.
"Of course," he conceded guardedly; "I know I was beastly when I hit a girl."
"Yes." Catie's accent was uncompromising. "It was a disgrace to you. I wonder you can look me in the face. If it had been any other boy, I never would have spoken to him again as long as I lived."
"Really?" To her extreme disgust, Scott seemed to take her utterances merely as matter for scientific investigation.
"Of course not," she said impatiently.
"But why?" he asked her.
"Why?" she flashed. "Because he wouldn't deserve to be spoken to, nor even looked at."
"No; I don't mean that," the boy answered, still with the same apparent desire to probe the situation to the very bottom. "But why should you speak to me, and not to him?"
She suspected him of fishing for a sweetie, and, out of sheer contrariety, she flung him a bit of crust.
"Because I am used to you, I suppose. One gets so, after eight or nine years of growing up together." And, in that one sentence, Catie showed the practical maturity of her grasp on life and on Scott Brenton.