“I think Roger would like her, if only Catherine would be nicer to him,” thought Elizabeth Ann, her cheeks bright red from running against the wind. “Oh, dear, I’m out of breath—and it’s snowing again!”
Sure enough, the white flakes were whirling around them and the gray sky seemed to be pressing in upon them.
“I hate snow,” said Catherine, who could not be said to look forward to the winter. “I like the summer but I hate winter.”
She was out of breath, too, now and had to walk more slowly. When they gained the main road, they amused themselves by walking in the broad treads, like ribbon bands, that the bus wheels had left marked on the snow.
“Perhaps we’ll get a lift,” said Roger, when they had walked perhaps half a mile.
“No we won’t,” contradicted Catherine. “Everyone has gone to the creamery. Any wagons or cars that pass us will be going toward home.”
Elizabeth Ann had to admit that she was right. Within the next ten minutes four wagons passed them, but they were all headed in the wrong direction. The empty milk cans, rattling in the back of the wagons showed that their drivers had been to the creamery in Gardner and were now going home.
Catherine stopped without warning when they came to a mail box fastened to a stump of a pine tree.
“My second cousin lives here,” she announced. “I’m going to see her. I can stay at her house till afternoon and then go home. I don’t feel well and I don’t think I ought to walk all that distance to school.”
“What will your mother say?” asked Elizabeth Ann, quite horrified.