"I'm goin' back to town because there's nothin' else to it for me," she said. "If I had my own way—I'd stay by that boy till he was ready to come back."
Cherry was startled at the girl's words and her face expressed something of what she felt. Anne glanced at her and hastened to continue.
"Oh, don't get me wrong on that," she said apologetically. "I know you'll do what's right—do it better than I could."
"I don't misunderstand you," Cherry replied, and to herself she wished Anne's words could have meant something different from the meaning she had taken from them.
"He's right," Anne continued, without more than a glance to satisfy Cherry; "he's right—an' that's sayin' something. I'm older than you—though twenty-five ought to be young enough for anyone—but I've seen a few men—an' a mighty lot of what passes for men—an' I'll tell you this, when you find a man that's on the level you can't help wantin' to keep him round. But—Lord, Anne's gettin' sentimental."
She broke off suddenly and gave her rein a shake, and the next moment was off along the trail with Cherry following at an easy, loping gait behind her.
They rode thus in silence until they came to the bridge over the White Pine. The water had gone down almost as suddenly as it had risen, and the crossing presented no difficulty whatever. Cherry waited till Anne had got safely over to the other side, and then, after an exchange of farewells, turned back towards the camp.
Cherry's mind was busy every moment of the ride home that morning. Anne was a strange girl, behind whose jaunty manner, she felt sure, were hidden heart-breaks and disappointments that the outside world knew nothing of. Cherry had talked with her only a very little, had never really come to know her at all, in fact—and had never thought of her as anything more than just Anne, the girl in MacMurray's lodging-house. And yet, in her presence, Cherry felt a subtle power—the power that comes from long and hard experience, that made it difficult even to talk much.
But always, as Cherry thought about her, there arose in the background an image of King Howden standing in the open doorway of the lodging-house with his arm about the girl, all but hidden in the gathering dusk. And somehow she could not resist the thought that Anne's words fully confirmed what she had first feared that evening when she rode so unexpectedly to MacMurray's door. The single hope to which she had clung in moments of depression, when disaster seemed about to break upon her world, was fast slipping away from her and she was being left to fight the battle alone.
And yet——