“I’ll walk over with you,” said Graham, only too ready to show his penitence, and Dorothy, who had an innate antipathy to being left behind, also proffered her services as escort.
Accordingly the trio set forth, Dorothy declining to follow the path but circling around the others, like an erratic planet, revolving about twin suns. Graham, who felt personally responsible for the shadow clouding Peggy’s bright face, lost no time in apologizing.
“Peggy, it’s a shame for me to upset things so. You’ll all wish that we had got discouraged over Mrs. Tyler’s reception, and gone on without stopping.”
“Why, no, Graham,” Peggy protested. “Nobody could have dreamed that anything like this would happen.”
Graham was not in a mood to spare himself. “Perhaps not, but there wasn’t any excuse for teasing poor Ruth almost into hysterics. It’s the kind of fun a red Indian might be expected to enjoy.”
Peggy was so inclined to agree with this diagnosis that she found it impossible to be as comforting as she would have liked. “I often wonder how it is that we all think teasing is fun,” she said. “Girls are just as bad as boys. In fact, I think their kind of teasing is even more cruel sometimes. It’s queer, when we stop to think of it, that anybody can get real satisfaction out of making some one else miserable, or even uncomfortable.”
“It’s beastly,” Graham declared with feeling. “I’m going to stop teasing Ruth, that’s sure. It seems so ridiculous to have her scream and wriggle if I point my finger at her, that I can’t realize that it isn’t all a joke. But, I suppose, it is serious enough from her point of view, and I’m going to quit.”
The walk to Farmer Cole’s, enlivened by similar expressions of penitence and good resolutions, was a very edifying excursion, and Peggy, in her sympathy for Graham, almost forgot her anxiety concerning Hobo. She was further relieved when the case was laid before Farmer Cole.
“Oh, he’ll get over it all right,” said that authority encouragingly. “Being a cur dog, that way. Now, if you buy a highbred animal, and pay a fancy price, it goes under at the least little thing. Never knew it to fail. But to kill a cur, you’ve got to blow him up with dynamite.”
“But they do die,” objected Peggy, who found it difficult to accept the farmer’s optimistic view, much as she wished to.