Blue Bonnet laughed. “Because it seems somehow as if it were Aunt Lucinda who was running this ranch.” She leaned back against a gnarled old stump. “Sometimes I wish,” she said, “that there were two of me—so that one of us could stay at home and be taught things, and behave nicely, while the other went wandering about as she liked.”
“You might adopt Sarah for your alter ego,” Alec suggested.
“It’s very puzzling—how people get mixed up. Sarah would have been such a suitable niece for Aunt Lucinda; though I really don’t believe,” Blue Bonnet’s blue eyes twinkled, “that she would have suited Grandmother as well as I do. Alec, it’s so—queer, being in a family where there are just women.”
“I’ve never tried it; sometimes I’ve thought it seemed rather lonesome being in a family where there weren’t any women.” Alec commenced to gather up the dishes, tossing the scraps to the dogs.
Blue Bonnet’s eyes were thoughtful. “It’s strange how much we have in common. Oh, Alec, I ought to be doing that!”
“It’s all done,” Alec answered.
“Sarah would’ve?”
“Yes, and washed the dishes in the brook, and tidied things up generally.”
“But at home no one ever expected me to do anything like that,” Blue Bonnet explained; “that’s the reason I’m always forgetting now.”
The talk drifted from Texas to Woodford and back again; broken by long pauses, in which each was content to sit silent in the soft green twilight of the woods, listening to the faint rustling of the trees overhead, the murmuring of the brook, and the occasional call of a bird.