The day was cold and lovely and outside the sun shone on the bare upturned branches of the trees and on the broad bosom of the earth.
“Silly child,” Jean began, arranging her paper and ink on the writing table before one of their windows, “why should you behave as though the question of my election was the only important thing in the world. On a day like this I only feel desperately homesick for Jack and the old ranch. What wouldn’t I give if we were all there to-day and just starting out on a long, hard ride? Sometimes I am so desperate about never seeing Jack that I don’t know what to do. I think I will write to Jim and to Ralph Merrit this afternoon, for it will help to make the time pass faster than anything else. I am afraid I have treated Ralph rather badly, as I promised to write him often and have only written twice. Then I want to ask Jim if he is really coming east to see how Jack is getting on. I wonder if he will hate to see Ruth again or like it? One never can tell about a person in love.”
Perhaps Jean’s thought of her old friends and affairs at the Rainbow Ranch may have had a cheering influence upon her, for no sooner had she put her pen to the paper than apparently all worry and suspense left her and she scratched away rapidly and clearly for several hours.
But poor Olive found no such distraction or solace; indeed, she kept up such a restless and unnecessary moving about the room that at any other time Jean most certainly would Lave scolded. First she tried studying her Shakespeare, since she was making a special effort to succeed in the Shakespeare class, and before coming east to school had read only a few plays with Ruth and the ranch girls in the big living room at the Lodge. But not the most thrilling historic drama nor the most delightful comedy by William Shakespeare could to-day take her mind from the one idea that engrossed it. After half an hour of merely pretending to read, she flung her book down on the floor, saying petulantly: “Tiresome stuff! I wonder what ever made me think for an instant I could stand any chance of getting the Shakespeare prize?”
Jean smiled. “Oh, I suppose, Olive, because Ruth and all of us thought you had a lot of talent for reciting and acting and you dearly love to read and study at most times. But why don’t you go out for a walk, you can find Frieda somewhere around downstairs and make her go with you. I don’t want to.”
“And I don’t want to either and won’t,” Olive answered with a good deal more temper than usual with her, and flying into her own room, she banged the door behind her. Rummaging about for some occupation, she came across a piece of sewing which she had once started at the Lodge, some white silk cut in the shape of a round cap to be covered over with small white pearl beads.
Slipping back once more into the sitting room, Olive found a low stool by the fire and there tried to see whether sewing would have a more soothing influence upon her than reading for the two more hours that had somehow to be disposed of. Yes, sewing on this occasion was more distracting than reading, for very soon Olive’s fingers worked automatically while her brain began to concern itself with interesting and puzzling ideas. The many hours which she had spent alone at Primrose Hall had not been wholly unprofitable—lonely hours need never be unless we choose to make them so—but Olive perhaps had more to think of and to ponder over than most girls of her age who have not led such eventful lives.
After her afternoon call at “The Towers” and her conversation later with Miss Winthrop, Olive had been reading all the books in the school library that she could find, which might help her explain the curious experience—confided to no one—through which she had passed that afternoon. But it was not just this one experience that had puzzled and worried Olive, for many strange fancies, impressions, memories, she knew not what to call them, had been drifting into her mind since her first sight of that white house on the hill on the morning after her arrival at Tarry dale. The ideas had no special connection with anything that was definite, but Olive was lately beginning to believe that she could recall dim ideas and events having no connection with the years she had spent in the Indian tent with old Laska. But why had these far-off memories not assailed her in the two years at the Rainbow Ranch? Perhaps then the recollection of Laska, of her son Josef, who had treated her with such an odd mixture of respect and cruelty, of the Indian people about her whom she had so disliked, had been too close, too omnipresent in her mind. Had she needed to come far away from the West and its associations to feel that she had come home? No, it was impossible, for Olive felt sure that she had never been east before in her life.
Finally the clock struck five and then half-past and at last six.
Jean, some moments before, had ceased writing and now sat calmly folding up her pile of letters, placing them in their respective envelopes. She looked tired and perhaps a trifle pale but composed. At last she got up from her chair and crossing the floor knelt down in front of Olive, taking the piece of sewing from her cold fingers.