"I am unhappy, Big Boy," sighed the girl. "We have never come back from our rides like this."
"It has been a wicked day for both of us, child."
"And you cannot call me child after to-day—so my father says." Her voice was still plaintive, but there was a hint of the old mischief there. "I'll be sixteen to-morrow—and I didn't know until to-day that I'd be so sorry that it is so. Ever since I was ten I've been wishing I could be eighteen without waiting for the years. But I don't know, now, Harlan. It seemed as though I'd be getting more out of living. I thought so." Tears were in her voice now. "It seems as though I'd grown up all of a sudden; and things aren't beautiful and happy and—and as they used to be—not any more! I've lost something, Harlan. And if growing up is losing so much, I don't want to grow up."
He listened indulgently and understood this protest of the child. Their horses walked slowly side by side, and the tired hounds trailed after them.
"The grown-ups do lose a lot of things out of life, little girl—things that mean a great deal in childhood. But keep your heart open, and other things will come."
"Perhaps when I get to be twenty-four years old and as big as you are I can talk that way, and believe it, too. But just now I'm only a girl that doesn't believe she's grown up, even if they do tell her so, and tell her she mustn't be a playmate any longer. And you are not to ride with me any more, and you are not to come to my house nor may I come to yours. That's what they say. What are we to do, then?"
She cried her question passionately. He had no answer ready. Platitudes would not do for this child, he reflected, and to lecture her then even on the A B C's of the social code would be wounding her ingenuous faith.
"If this is the way it all turns out, and I can't have your friendship any longer, what is it that you're going to do or I'm going to do?" she insisted. "That's losing too much, just because one is grown up."
Tenderness surged in his heart toward this motherless girl—tenderness in which there was a new quality. But he had no answer for her just then. He did not understand his own emotions. He was as unsophisticated as she in the affairs of the heart. His man's life of the woods had kept him free from women. His friendship with this child, their rides, their companionship, had been almost on the plane of boy with boy; her character invited that kind of intimacy.
And so he wondered what to say; for her demand had been explicit, and she demanded candor in return.