“I was going home—to the ranch.”
“It was—the having to come.”
“Suppose you tell me why you had to come?”
“Because I—didn’t stay in yesterday, when Miss Rankin told me to.”
“Why didn’t you, Elizabeth?”
And Blue Bonnet, looking at him with a pair of very frank blue eyes, told him why,—very much as she had told her grandmother.
There was a short silence when she had finished; then Mr. Hunt said, “Elizabeth, do you suppose you are the only one who gets tired, very tired, of the confinement of school work—who longs for the open? What if we were all—Miss Rankin, all the teachers, myself—to drop everything, and go when the fancy seized us?”
“But I don’t,” Blue Bonnet answered; “I’ve never been before school closed, though it’s been pretty hard not to, some days.”
“Yesterday was not the first time you went before you had the right—even though school was over.”