Instead of a hundred-dollar check, which had been Jack’s Christmas present to both Jean and Frieda in order that they might have their Christmas visits to friend’s, she had given Olive a brown fur coat and cap. Olive had not worn them before, but now, with the snow falling and the thought of Jack in her mind, she put them both on. For a minute she glanced at herself in her mirror before leaving the house and though her vanity was less than most girls’, she could not help a slight thrill of pleasure on seeing her own reflection in the mirror. Somehow her new furs were uncommonly becoming, as they are to most people. The soft brown of the cap showed against the blue-black darkness of her hair and in her olive cheeks there was a bright color which grew brighter the longer and faster she trudged through the lightly falling snow.
Olive did not know the direction that Miss Winthrop had taken for her walk, but half guessed that she must have gone for a visit to Madame Van Mater, as she was in the habit of calling on the old lady every few days and knew Olive’s dislike to accompanying her. Indeed, she had not been inside “The Towers” nor seen its mistress since her first and only visit there. But now she set off in the direction of the house, hoping to find her friend returning toward home.
The walk through the woods, Olive’s first walk in the vicinity of Primrose Hall, was now a familiar one and less dark because the trees had long ago cast off their cloakings of leaves and were covered only with the few snowflakes that clung to them. No man or woman who has lived a great deal out of doors in their youth fails to draw new strength and cheerfulness from the air and sunshine, and Olive, who had left school thinking only that Jack’s operation might not be successful and of the pain her friend must suffer, now began to dwell on the beautiful possibility of her growing well and strong as she had been in the old days at the ranch and of their being reunited there some day not too far off. Then she had been weakly believing that she would never hear news of herself, that old Laska was probably dead or had disappeared into some other Indian encampment. Now with her blood running quickly in her veins from the cold and the snow, she determined if Laska failed her to go west the next summer and try to trace out her ancestry herself. Miss Winthrop, Ruth and the four ranch girls she knew stood ready to help her in anything she might undertake.
“It is a pretty good thing to have friends, even if one is bare of relations,” Olive thought, coming out of the woods to the opening where she could catch the first glimpse of the big white house. “I wish Miss Winthrop would come along out of there,” she said aloud after waiting a minute and finding that standing still made her shiver in spite of her furs. “I wonder why I can’t get up the courage to march up to that front door past those two fierce iron dogs, ring the bell and ask for her. I don’t have to go into the house, and as it is growing a little late, Miss Winthrop would probably prefer my not walking back alone. Besides, I want to walk with her.”
Like most people with only a few affections, Olive’s were very true and deep, and now that she had learned to care for Miss Winthrop, she cared for her with all her heart.
Slowly she approached the house, hesitating once or twice and looking up toward the tower room as though she were ashamed to recall her own foolishness on the afternoon of her introduction to it. There was no one about in the front of the house, not a servant nor a caller. For a moment Olive stopped, smiling, by one of the big iron dogs that seemed to guard the entrance to the old place. She brushed off a little snow from the head of one of them and, stooping, patted it. “Isn’t it silly of me to think I remember having seen you?” she murmured. And then Olive’s hand went up swiftly to her own eyes and she appeared to be brushing away something from them as she had brushed the snow from the statue of a dog. “I haven’t seen you before, I have only heard about you. And I haven’t seen this old house, but I have been told about it until I felt almost as if I had seen it,” she announced with greater conviction in her tones than she had ever used before, even to herself, in trying to recall the confused impressions of her childhood.
But now, instead of going up the front steps of the old house and ringing the bell, she hesitated. And while she waited the door was suddenly opened and into the white world outside Miss Winthrop stepped with an expression on her face no one had ever seen it wear before—one of surprise and wonder, anger and pleasure.
“Olive, is it you?” she said just as if she had expected to find the girl waiting outside for her on the doorstep. “Come in to Madame Van Mater. We have something to tell you.”
“I SUPPOSE I CANNOT DENY THE PROOFS YOU HAVE BROUGHT TO ME.”