“Don’t stay there in the cold,” remonstrated Beatrice. “You can’t see anything or—or anybody in the middle of the night.”
“I know it,” sighed Nancy as she turned from the window. “I was just thinking.”
She climbed on the bed and sat with her knees humped and her arm flung around them, still staring, as though fascinated, out through the window toward that slope of the mountain where John Herrick lived.
“He doesn’t look like dad or Aunt Anna,” Beatrice protested suddenly, with no apparent connection with anything that had been said. “No, he isn’t like them at all.”
“Maybe not,” returned Nancy inscrutably, “but he has that same light yellow hair that she has. If Aunt Anna were very sunburnt or he were very pale—it might be—that they would not be so very different.”
CHAPTER VIII
MRS. BRUIN
Although the girls had talked so late of Aunt Anna’s story and the strange thought they had concerning it, they were up early next morning and still discussing the matter busily as they prepared breakfast.
“The question is,” said Nancy, plying her egg-beater with vigor, “shall we tell Aunt Anna what we think?”
“If we should be mistaken, and John Herrick should turn out to be, oh, just anybody, she would be so disappointed. Perhaps we had better wait.”
They had hardly finished breakfast when there was a knock at the door, followed by Dr. Minturn’s tall presence on the threshold. He inspected his patient and announced a very great improvement, and then said he must go on at once, since he hoped to visit the town and start back over the mountain that same day. Beatrice walked down with him through the pines, for he had tied his horse at the gate.