“Yes,” Miss Lucinda answered; she was putting the room to rights now. Blue Bonnet watched her interestedly. “How easily you do things—so quickly and without a bit of fuss,” she said. “There comes the doctor—I know he’ll say I’m foolish—lying here.”
What the doctor said, among other things, was that, in his opinion, Woodford had the unenviable distinction at that moment of containing two as headstrong and foolish young persons as it had ever been his lot to run across. And he ended by prescribing a day’s quiet in bed for Blue Bonnet; after which, he and Aunt Lucinda went downstairs together.
“A little cold, a good deal of fatigue, and considerable nervous excitement,” the doctor told Mrs. Clyde and Miss Lucinda. “She isn’t as rugged as some of our Woodford girls,” he added, “and this is her first New England winter. Quiet and coddling will bring her around all right.”
“And Kitty?” Mrs. Clyde inquired.
“Tired, and I trust—penitent,” Kitty’s father answered.
Blue Bonnet slept most of the day, Solomon mounting guard on the rug beside her bed. According to calculation, it should have been Saturday, but never had Solomon known his mistress to spend Saturday in such peculiar fashion before.
When Blue Bonnet finally awoke, towards late afternoon, feeling wonderfully rested, she found Grandmother sitting before the fire, her sewing lying idly in her lap. She looked tired and troubled, Blue Bonnet told herself, and it was all her fault.
“Grandmother,”—Blue Bonnet sat up in bed, shaking her hair back from her face—“please, I am ever and ever so sorry! About last night—it was just a foolish dare that I took up—and was too obstinate to let drop. I don’t believe, in the beginning, Kitty really meant it for a dare; she was only teasing. And I might have gone, even if she hadn’t gone too, but she wouldn’t have gone without me. So it was a good deal more my fault than hers. Once we’d got started, neither of us would give in. And then—afterwards, all the way home through the dark—I kept thinking of what happened last summer—out on the ranch; and seeing it all over again; and remembering what Uncle Joe said—how it need never have happened, if the poor, foolish fellow had had the grit enough not to take a dare. You see, one of the other cowboys dared him to ride that horse, and he would do it—though Uncle Joe warned him not to.”
“It should not have taken much ‘grit’ not to take Kitty’s dare last night, Blue Bonnet,” Mrs. Clyde said, gravely. “A moment’s thought should have been enough to deter you.”
“Somehow, I never do seem to do my thinking until afterwards,” Blue Bonnet mourned.