“I did not come here to get well,” she said. “I came for something very different. And I am not going back.”
She swayed—caught at the railing, too faint and ill to argue further. Nancy ran to help her but she still struggled to make them understand. She sent Beatrice a desperate, imploring glance and strove to speak again, but no words would come.
“You must make her go,” insisted Christina. “Sam can lift her on the train. She will thank you in the end.”
Beatrice shook her head.
“I don’t understand at all why she wants to stay,” she said, “but stay she shall. There is only one other thing to do. We will go to the cabin up on the mountain. Sam, can you get the keys from Dan O’Leary’s house? The place has been used lately, and it is safe from this fire, at least. Nancy, pack Aunt Anna’s things and I will gather up the rest. We can’t start too soon.”
Half an hour later the rickety old carriage was groaning and lurching up the mountain road. No one said a word as they climbed steadily upward. Beatrice, looking back, saw the red flames still leaping madly, still heard, though faintly, the shouts of the men as they ran here and there to bring fresh fuel to the fire. The responsibility of choice had in the end rested upon her; it would be her part to make life in the mountain cabin possible. Could she do it? Had she chosen well? They came into the shadow of the forest, and, in the stillness, following the uproar below, they heard the weird yapping of a coyote somewhere in the hills.
CHAPTER III
NEIGHBORS
“Do you remember,” said Nancy, as she and Beatrice viewed each other across a wilderness of overflowing trunks, half-unpacked boxes of bedding, baskets of china, and packages of groceries, “do you remember how that Englishman at your sorority dance used to talk about an affair like this as ‘settling in’? Settling wouldn’t be so hard, but settling in! Will all this stuff ever go inside this house?”
“I don’t know,” replied Beatrice abstractedly. “It will have to go in somehow. Surely we need everything that is here.”
She spoke absently, for the mention of the dance had brought a sudden flood of memories and of odd fancies. It had been the last one she had attended before the doctor’s verdict concerning Aunt Anna’s health, which had upset all their plans and driven them West. It must have been in another world, she thought, that evening at the country club with the moonlight coming in on the polished floor, with the whirling maze of colored dresses, the swinging music, and the soft sound of multitudes of sliding feet. She stepped out upon the stone doorstep, and looked down between the giant red trunks of the pine-trees down upon the white thread of road winding to the valley, upon the huddle of box-like houses, with the slow smoke rising from the blackened ruins in the midst.