“By the way,” said John Herrick as Beatrice stood on the step below, “my Hester is too informal a person for introductions, and she has not even told me your name. Indeed, I doubt if she knows it herself. Won’t you tell us who you are and who is at the cabin with you?”
What a cordial, friendly smile, he had, Beatrice thought, and how it lighted his brown face!
“My Aunt Anna and my sister Nancy are at the cottage with me,” she said. “The place is mine; my father gave it to me. My name is Beatrice Deems.”
Never had she seen a countenance change so abruptly as did John Herrick’s as he turned suddenly and went into the house, leaving Hester to say her good-bys alone.
It was at the end of a very laborious but satisfactory day that Nancy came up to her sister’s room to find Beatrice writing at the rough pine table.
“Everything is in order, and Christina and Sam have just gone,” said Nancy. “There wasn’t anything more you wanted them to do, was there?”
“Oh, I wanted them to mail my letters,” exclaimed Beatrice, seizing her envelopes and jumping up. “It took me so long to write everything to dad that I only just finished this one that I promised Christina for her boy, Olaf. Perhaps I can catch Sam at the gate.”
She sped down the path through the pines and was able to overtake Christina and Sam where they had paused to put up the bars. Beatrice was just explaining to the Finnish woman what she had written, when a heavy slouching figure came up the road through the shadows and Thorvik, in his broken English, addressed his sister roughly.
“You spend the whole day here—spend the night too? I have not yet my supper!”
It was evident that he wished Beatrice, also, to know of his displeasure, or he would have used his own tongue. He grasped Christina angrily by the arm and shot the girl a scowling glance of such fierce enmity that involuntarily she shrank back behind the gate. It was difficult, under that frowning scrutiny, to hand the two letters to Sam,—the more so since Christina eyed one of the envelopes with such nervous apprehension. Even a duller eye than Thorvik’s might have noted that the letter was of special importance to her.