Five minutes later Hetty tapped at Miss Schuyler’s door. The pink tinge still showed in her cheeks, and her eyes had a suspicious brightness in them.
“Flo,” she said, “you’ll go back to New York right off. I’m sorry I brought you here. This place isn’t fit for you.”
“I am quite willing, so long as you are coming too.”
“I can’t. Isn’t that plain? This thing is getting horrible—but I have to see it through. It was Clavering fixed it, any way.”
“Put it away until to-morrow,” Flora Schuyler advised. “It will be easier to see whether you have any cause to be angry then.”
Hetty turned towards her with a flash in her eyes. “I know just what you mean, and it would be nicer just to look as if I never felt anything, as some of those English folks you were fond of did; but I can’t. I wasn’t made that way. Still, I’m not going to apologize for my father. He is Torrance of Cedar, and I’m standing in with him—but if I were a man I’d go down and whip Clavering. I could almost have shaken him when he wanted to stay here and tried to make me ask him.”
“Well,” said Flora Schuyler, quietly, “I am going to stay with you; but I don’t quite see what Clavering has done.”
“No?” said Hetty. “Aren’t you just a little stupid, Flo? Now, he has made me ashamed—horribly—and I was proud of the men we had in this country. He’s starving the women and the little children; there are quite a few of them lying in freezing shanties and sod-huts out there in the snow. It’s just awful to be hungry with the temperature at fifty below.”
Miss Schuyler shivered. It was very warm and cosy sitting there, behind double casements, beside a glowing stove; but there had been times when, wrapped in costly furs and great sleigh-robes and generously fed, she had felt her flesh shrink from the cold of the prairie.
“But they have Mr. Grant to help them,” she said.