“You just mind your own business, Nelson Haley!” snapped Annette. “I don’t care! I don’t care what folks think of me, or what they say!” and she burst into a torrent of tears and rushed from the room.
“Humph!” muttered the teacher, as he left for his boarding place. “Guess I’m always putting my foot in it. And it does seem as though whenever I start to try and make it up with Janice, either Annette or her brother interferes. Confound it!” and he shrugged down into the collar of his coat and plodded on through the gathering storm.
CHAPTER XX
THE BARN DANCE
Annette Bowman had kept up her association with the Slater girls. Judge Slater’s place was fully ten miles from Polktown and on a road that branched south into the valley from the Lower Middletown pike. Annette went over to see the Slater girls at least once a week, or they came to visit her at the Lake View Inn.
Like Annette, the Judge’s daughters had been of the ultra-fashionable set that attended the private school in which the civil engineer’s sister was supposedly “finished.” Frank confessedly did not like them. He told Janice that they were “cacklers,” and that “they didn’t have an ounce of sense in their heads.”
The civil engineer liked girls who were of a practical turn of mind. He was jolly enough, and was good company; but of small talk he had little. He took life rather earnestly, did this young engineer, and he had an object to aim for, which, although he did not confide in Janice, she strongly suspected.
Frank had nothing to do with the barn dance that was arranged to take place at Judge Slater’s soon after the first heavy snow had fallen. The roads quickly became well packed, as they do in the Green Mountains, and sleighing promised to last until the February thaw. Annette was the prime mover in the barn dance, but Judge Slater and his wife saw to it that the invitations to Polktown people were quite general. The Judge was looking for an election to the State Legislature, and he ran no risk of offending anybody.
The Slater barn had an enormous floor, and the planks were in very good condition. There had been so much interest in dancing that fall in Polktown, that a big crowd made preparations to attend. Everything on runners owned in and about the village was requisitioned long before the evening named in the invitation.
Annette herself had gone over to Judge Slater’s the day before. “You’ll surely come, Frank, now, won’t you?” she said to her brother. “You know, dancing men will be awfully scarce. These ‘hicks’ are just about as graceful as cows on a dancing floor,” and she laughed carelessly.
“My goodness, Annette, but you are a hypocrite!” growled her brother. “You make me sick. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth when you’re talking to these people, while behind their backs you only make fun of them.”