Percy blushed with pleasure, and thought, "There, I needn't have been so uneasy about my lesson."
"I did have my lesson perfectly, after all," she wrote to Aunt Zoe (for she always wrote home every week); "and Miss Reynolds says I made the lesson interesting, because I could tell about Arizona and Colorado."
"I am glad you had no trouble with your lesson," wrote Aunt Zoe; "but I was not surprised, because I had no idea you would have any. It would be a good thing if you could learn a good old maxim: 'Never cross a bridge till you come to it.'"
When the steamboat ceased its daily trips in November, Percy's weekly visits to her aunt came to an end, as a matter of course; for, though a stage ran between the two places, the road was heavy clay, and apt to be very bad.
By this time, however, Percy had learned to be well contented at school. She liked the girls, and they liked her; she was getting on famously with her studies, and had actually made an intimate friend of a girl of her own age. Flora Lester's father had been a physician in Round Springs for many years; but he had lately gone to Colorado with his wife to look after some property which had fallen to him by the death of a brother; and Flora had been left as a boarder at Hansen school, where she had been a day-scholar almost ever since she could remember.
The acquaintance began through Flora's desire to learn as much as she could about the place where her father and mother were living, and where she might some day go herself. For Dr. Lester liked the climate of Colorado, and found his own health and his wife's the better for the change, and he began to talk quite seriously about selling his place and practice at Round Springs, and setting up his staff in Denver city.
"Don't you hate the thought of going out there, away from everybody you have ever known?" asked Percy one day, after Flora had been reading a letter from her father.
"I don't know—no," answered Flora, considering before she spoke, as usual. "Perhaps I should, if I thought much about it; but I don't. Something may happen, or father may change his mind; and if I do have to go, maybe I shall like it after all. There is no use in borrowing trouble, and fretting about things that may never come to pass, you know, Percy."
"That is just what Percy doesn't know," remarked Blandina, in whose room the conversation had taken place. "If she did, she would not keep such a zoölogical garden of bugbears to frighten herself with. She is always sure she is going to be late at breakfast, and afraid that she shall miss in her lesson, and perfectly certain that she shall never have wool enough to finish her cushion, or be able to match the colour, if she hasn't. It is no wonder Mrs. Herman complains that she doesn't grow fat. How can she, when she has all these ravenous bugbears to feed?"
Percy laughed and blushed a little. Flora's contented spirit and Blandina's good-natured ridicule had begun to make her feel a little ashamed of her constant forebodings of evil.