“But, still....” Here came the Guardian’s ordeal, from which she must not flinch, but which, at the bitter moment, she would rather have died than face. “But, still I had better go down myself to the horse-farm and telephone her home. Her parents have just got back.”
And now, in the dawn-blink Mr. Grosvenor was expected here, at any minute. The Guardian and Sanbie, in whose young heart the laugh seemed forever frozen black by the consciousness that he had better have let all the choice “stock” on the mountainside perish than incur this loss, were out searching slope and stream-edge hopelessly again.
Weary girls, purple-lipped from exhaustion—heavy-lidded—white-cheeked, had been condemned, as they felt it, to rest, or try to rest, a little.
Pemrose flatly rebelled. “If anything, has happened to Una, I don’t want to live,” she said in her passionate, tearless way. “I—I shouldn’t want to live on,” with a quaver, “but I suppose—they’d make me.”
Who was to enforce the boon of Life? Her father—her other joke-fellow—play-fellow—Treff?
There was a sudden sound of hoofs without the camp, hoofs slipping upon rolling stones—striking flinty flashes out of the dawn, the pale, primrose dawn?
Pemrose was at the door, feeling suffocated.
A haggard youth threw himself off a lame horse. It was not Sanbie.
“Treff-ff!”
The boy as he saw her face, held out his arms to her. She threw herself into them. She caught him by the shoulders convulsively. And in the dawn the tears came—washed her blue eyes in a silent flood, a silent, helpless stream.