“Isn’t it a big trunk and doesn’t it look delightfully travellingified?”
“Delightfully what?”
Blue Bonnet laughed. Reaching up, she touched the little knot of dark blue, pea-like blossoms in her uncle’s buttonhole. “You won’t forget me while you have your blue bonnets,” she said.
“I reckon I won’t forget you, Honey.”
They went in to supper, Blue Bonnet talking and laughing excitedly; but afterwards, when she and her uncle went out to the front veranda as usual, her mood changed suddenly. It was so still, so peaceful, out there—and yet, already, so strangely alien.
For a few moments she walked up and down restlessly, followed closely by Don. Don scented the coming change; he thoroughly disapproved of that roped trunk on the back veranda.
“Uncle Cliff—” Blue Bonnet came at last to sit on the arm of her uncle’s chair, letting her head rest on his shoulder. Something had got to be put into words, which she had been trying to say in various other ways for a good many days past. “Uncle Cliff, I—truly—I am sorry—that I spoke the way I did—that night.”
Mr. Ashe stroked the brown head gently. “That’s all right, Honey. And remember, Honey, if things go wrong, if you’re disappointed, or—anything like that, you’ve only to send word. This is your home,—and will be—for six years. And, Honey, you won’t forget,—what your father said,—that you were to try to live as he had taught you to ride—straight and true.”