So the two pushed doggedly on through the fast-deepening dusk, stumbling more than once against snags; tired, cold, hungry, and miserable, and with the discouraging knowledge that every moment was taking them further from home.
It seemed to Blue Bonnet as if the pond had no end, but was like some dreary, enchanted lake in the fairy stories; that she and Kitty, like the brook, must go on and on forever. It did not seem possible that it could be the same pond she and the others had skated on so gaily that afternoon—if it really was that afternoon.
It was quite dark by now. Far away, across the fields, a solitary light showed in some lonely farmhouse window, and now and then they caught the sound of a dog barking.
It wouldn’t have been so unbearable, Blue Bonnet thought, if only Kitty would speak.
And then Kitty did speak—“We shall have to keep close to the bank from now on—the ice isn’t safe further out—that is, unless you want to go back?” No one should say that she had not given Blue Bonnet every opportunity to behave like a reasonable being.
“Do you?” Blue Bonnet asked.
In her heart, Kitty knew herself more than ready, but the little demon that had seemed hovering near her all the afternoon, prompted her to say, “We haven’t got to the end yet. I thought—”
On they went again, both too tired to skate at all fast. Kitty told herself that she would never dare anyone like Blue Bonnet Ashe again; it had proved a veritable boomerang of a dare. Blue Bonnet felt that once she had got her skates off, she should never want to see them again. While the realization that ahead of them both waited a probable very bad quarter of an hour, did not serve to make things any brighter.
And then a little group of bare trees loomed tall and shadowy almost in front of them, and, a moment later, the end of the pond was reached.
“I know now,” Blue Bonnet dropped wearily down on the snowy bank, “how Miss Rankin’s beloved Pilgrim Fathers felt when they landed on Plymouth Rock!”