The sullen animosity deepened on the man’s face.
“You make nothing more with my sister; see?” he said, as he led Christina away.
Sam nodded a subdued good night, clucked low-spiritedly to his horses, and drove slowly after the two. Even his unquenched cheerfulness seemed affected by instinctive dread of Thorvik’s sour ill-temper. Nor was it with a very cheerful heart that Beatrice walked back alone up the path. It rendered her task of living by no means easier to realize that she had made an enemy of such a man as Thorvik. Yet the light from her cabin, shining small and yellow beneath the giant pines, seemed somehow to rekindle her failing courage. Those two dearly loved people were there within, Nancy and Aunt Anna. Surely the way would be shown to her to care for them and keep them safe.
CHAPTER IV
SHERLOCK HOLMES
It was a week later and Beatrice, with a landscape of blue mountains and green forest showing beyond her through the open door, was standing on the threshold in her riding clothes.
“I have finished my share of the housework and I am off for a ride,” she said to Nancy.
Her sister smiled broadly over her dusting.
“I would never have thought,” she declared, “that you could curry a horse and split the kindling before breakfast and that I could scrub floors and wash dishes every day and that we both of us would like it. There must be something strange in this mountain air.”
They had begun to feel as settled as though they had been at their housekeeping in the cabin for months. The cottage itself was a different place, an entrancingly pleasant and comfortable one. Hester Herrick, with whom they were now great friends, was always bringing them things—some big black andirons for the great fireplace, a collection of soft pine pillows, and the thick bearskin rug that lay before the hearth.
“Roddy said you were to have it. He shot the bear himself last winter,” she said when the girls protested that this last gift was too great a one.