“Menzies needn’t complain,” said Una hotly, looking down at the tall figure of the farmer out in the Long Pasture. “Father is going to send Sanbie, his son, to college when he leaves high school, lend him the money to go—a loan he never means to take back. They say that boy, burnt and exhausted as he was, just searched all through the night I was lost, saying: ‘Now you see her—and now you don’t!’”
A little mischief crept into the rippling tones, too—fixing a stationary star in Una’s dark eye.
Pemrose sat very still upon her warm rock, crop in hand, gazing down at the Long Pasture—its colts and horses.
Seven months had passed since Andrew wheeled Revel on the verge of a washout, where the road had been eaten away—months in which the two girls had tasted the novel excitements of boarding school life, minus radio between their two rooms—and it was the first time that Una had seemed inclined to talk freely and naturally of a wild ride up and down Little Sister Mountain—Little Sister smiling under her April curl papers of mist.
“Yes, Mr. Grosvenor said the horse which carried me after you should never go out of the family,” dimpled Pemrose, “and that, as I was an honorary member thereof, he was going to give him to me,” arching black eyebrows. “He’d have made Treff a present of Cartoon, too, only ‘Hop’—I call him that when I want to tease him—said he wouldn’t have that old Sickle Face, at any price.... But what put Her—I’m not going to call her your aunt—into your head now?”
“Father has been to see her lately.” Una’s lip corners twitched a little. “You know she was taken to a hospital, very ill with brain fever, after Andrew stopped the two horses on the verge of that washed-out bank—Andrew has never stopped, calling himself a ‘fool-body’, since, because he didn’t let her go over.”
There was the faintest note of a chuckle in the voice now.
“So you can talk about it easily; can you?” Pemrose glanced, sidelong, at her friend, murmuring silently to herself. “It seems as if that night in the cabin on Little Sister was a ‘canny moment’ as Andrew calls the hour of birth,” with a mute little quiver of laughter. “And so—and so She’s getting better,” she said aloud.
“Yes, she was very weak after the fever and either couldn’t or wouldn’t remember—things. But now she seems softened—sorry for what she did.”
“So she jolly well may be—as Treff would say!” Pemrose kicked at the grass with her riding-boot. “I suppose it was she who set fire to the shed?”