Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when the schoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to see him, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage, and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a few minutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road, where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago.
“I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone,” he said. “The men on the road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners. I hope you are not going to the spring!”
“Why?” said she. “Did you not drink to our return?”
“But you would not drink with me, so the spell did not work; and now the spring is gone,—all its beauty, I mean. The water is there, in a tank, where the Chinamen fill their buckets night and morning, and the teamsters water their horses. We'll go over there, if you would like to see the march of modern improvements.”
“No,” she said; “I had rather remember it as it was; still, I don't believe in being sentimental about such things. Let us sit down a while.”
A vague depression, which Arnold had been aware of in her manner when they met, became suddenly manifest in her paleness and in a look of dull pain in her eyes.
“But you are hurt about it,” he said. “I wish I hadn't told you in that brutal way. I'm afraid I'm not many degrees removed from the primeval savage, after all.”
“Oh, you needn't mind,” she said, after a moment. “That was the only place I cared for, here, so now there will be nothing to regret when I go away.”
“Are you going away, then? I'm very sorry to hear it; but of course I'm not surprised. You couldn't be expected to stand it another year; those children must have been something fearful.”
“Oh, it wasn't the children.”