When I looked at her the corners of her lovely mouth were down like those of a child in trouble.
"Please don't look at me," she said.
We rode on very slowly in silence. Sometimes, without looking, I could not be sure that she was still crying. Then I would hear a little pathetic sniffling—a catching of the breath. Or she would fall to pounding the thigh with her fist.
But she pulled herself together very quickly and borrowed my handkerchief and when we reached the telegraph office her own husband could not have known that she had been crying.
She held my pony while I telegraphed Gerald Colebridge that I could not go to California with him.
Far from looking like one who had recently been crying, she looked a triumphant little creature, as she sat the one pony, and held the other. The color had all come back to her face, and she looked—why, she looked happy!
XIII
"Well, my dear," said my mother, "we shall miss you."
"Oh," I said, "I've given it up. I'm not going."