And yet, how they had tormented her with their way of seeing and yet not seeing her, and answering and yet not answering. And she was lonely—desperately lonely. She longed to see the gleam come in the girls’ eyes when they looked at her, which they turned upon each other. All the long, quiet Sunday afternoon she thought of it, though she tried to read. She knew Azalea and Carin were together, for she had heard them planning a horseback ride, while she was alone, and as she told herself sadly, likely to be alone every Sunday, since she knew no one she really wished to be with—save those two, of course.
She had an hour of trying to hate them, but she failed miserably. For all they had made her suffer, she could not get as far as hating them. She failed to sleep well that night. Her mind whirled like a merry-go-round, always bringing back the same thoughts and persons. Azalea and Carin, Carin and Azalea. The bright and charming faces kept returning, but never once did they seem to bear the smiles of friendship and understanding.
Naturally she was far from being herself when she went down to breakfast the next morning, and when her Aunt Adnah said, “You see to it, Ann, that you’re not put upon there at Mrs. Carson’s,” her patience snapped like a wind-filled bag.
“Oh, please leave me alone, Aunt Adnah,” she cried hotly. “I’ll take care of myself all right.”
“My dear, my dear,” murmured Miss Zillah, “ought you to be speaking like that to your Aunt Adnah?”
Annie Laurie knew very well that she ought not, and she was morally certain that if Carin and Azalea could have heard her, they would have cried: “There, see! You call her a nice girl?”
Well, maybe she wasn’t a nice girl, but certainly she was an unhappy one.
She put her head up as high as she could comfortably carry it on her very slim neck and marched away to school. It was a wonderful winter morning—the sort that got into the blood of horses and made them prance. Perhaps it was in Annie Laurie’s blood, too, as she entered the schoolroom that morning. Miss Parkhurst had not yet come, and Carin and Azalea sat together laughing over some charts of the South Sea Isles. Miss Parkhurst had laid out an interesting course for them, all relating to the Archipelago; and geography, history, biography, poetry and fiction were to be woven together until the life of the “burning isles” appeared before them in a series of vivid mental pictures.
If Annie Laurie had been aware of the amount of explosive material in her brain and heart that morning, perhaps she would have had the discretion to remain at home. She really was about as dangerous as a keg of gunpowder, and it chanced that Carin’s first words were as a match to produce the inevitable explosion.
“I don’t suppose you’d care about reading Stevenson’s ‘Ebb Tide,’ would you, Annie Laurie? Not, I mean, as a part of the South Sea study?” She put the question in that cold, detached little voice which she had used from the first to the “new girl.” “We couldn’t expect a thorough person like yourself to enjoy such an unbusiness-like way of getting at things. I said to Miss Parkhurst that probably Azalea and I had better keep that for reading after hours, and during school we’ll study any old Smithsonian Institute reports you and she manage to look up.”