Kit stared out of the window, rather resentfully. She would be seventeen in November, and Jean was past nineteen. Nineteen loomed ahead of her as a year of discretion, a time when you naturally came into your heritage of mature reason and common sense. The Dean, she remembered, had once remarked that the human brain did not reach its full development until eighteen, and how at the time she resented it, feeling absolutely sure at sixteen there was nothing under the sun she could not understand fully.
But the tumble in the river and peril to her life had left her completely stranded on the unknown shore of indecision. Evidently it was just what Billie had called it, a fool stunt for her to try and row up that river alone. Kit had always gone rather jauntily along doing as she thought best with an unshakable confidence that nothing could happen to her.
Another thing, she had a very uncomfortable sensation, for her enemy had heaped coals of fire on her head and returned good for evil in such an overwhelming measure that she never could repay him. Twenty-four hours had made an enormous difference in her outlook on life.
The afternoon of the third day she was allowed to sit down on the porch. Doris and Jean hovered over her quite as if she was made of glass, and nearly all the cabin colonists visited her in relays. Billie came up last of all, but Frank did not appear.
“He’s gone off up in the hills,” Billie told her, “chasing some kind of a new moth. He said to tell you he would be back to see you later this afternoon. You’d be awfully dead by now, Kit, if he hadn’t happened to see you go down, because I was in the cabin and didn’t know anything about it. But it was just like him to dash after you and pull you out.”
Kit leaned her chin reflectively on her hand. “Heroes are such uncomfortable people in everyday life, Bill,” she said. “Everybody, even Dad and Mom, keep telling me how everlastingly grateful I must be to him for saving my life. I don’t see what I can do except thank him, and I’ve done that.”
“Treat him decently,” Billie suggested, “even if you don’t like him. Hide it.”
“Oh, I like him well enough,” Kit answered, “only he’s never seemed like Buzzy, and Ralph, and you. I guess I’ve always resented everyone thinking he was so wonderful. It was as though he had had a sort of sweet revenge on me for taking him for a berry thief.”
True to his word, Frank came down to see Kit just before dinner with some startling news.
“I’ll be leaving for Europe in another month, Kit. I just received a letter granting me a fellowship to go over there to examine European species of insects. If you’ll be real good, Kit, and never call me a berry thief again, I’ll write to you.”