This afternoon, to assure their friends that they were neither uncomfortable nor unhappy at the ranch house, Mrs. Colter was entertaining the entire club of the Silver Arrow together with a few older friends.
At this moment she and Mrs. Perry were standing outside the group of younger people.
"But, Jeanette, you must not refuse," Lina protested. "You understood that the honor was to be bestowed upon the individual member of the club who accomplished the most courageous deed during the summer. You helped make this decision and possess no power to change it. The club was to ask the advice of a few older friends and then vote on the question. We have followed the rules and there is no appeal. The fact that you warned us that the lodge was on fire and then went back a second time to help mother and Via was a courageous act. Jeanette dear, I don't think you need feel you have no right to the arrow."
"Here, here!" Cecil Perry and Eric Lawton cried in chorus.
Their voices were followed by a clapping of hands.
"Then why does mother—Mrs. Colter, of course, I mean—not receive the award? She returned first to search for Via and found her; they were more than halfway down the stairs when I reached them."
"Jeanette, Mrs. Colter is not a member of the Club of the Silver Arrow and you therefore have no rival," Eric Lawton, the president of the club, announced with an admiring glance toward the older woman.
Jeanette Colter's face wore the obstinate expression with which her friends were familiar.
"I have something to tell you, several things in fact. Then you will understand why I have no right to the silver arrow and cannot permit you to present it me."
Jeanette was wearing a white muslin gown Mrs. Perry had made from one of her own, the greater number of Jeanette's clothes having perished in the lodge fire. The dress was singularly becoming, although at this moment her face was nearly as white as her gown. From her eyes the blue seemed to have disappeared until they looked the shade of smoke-gray clouds.