“I should think you were going to marry Neptune. Here are some fish-plates!”
“They ought to have added something especially for the expedition!”
Fanny occupied herself in arranging the silver.
“Aren’t you a little afraid of it, Diane? The thought of that frozen solitude frightens me. I’ve no courage!”
Diane made no immediate reply, and Fanny, giving her a sidelong look, discovered that she had stopped work and was looking out of the window with an absent air, her face quite colorless. The girl’s heart beat fast with a sensation almost of anger. She was sure, with her keen, girlish insight into such things, that at the moment Diane was thinking, not of Faunce, but of Overton.
Fanny’s heart leaped up in defense of her hero. She remembered him at her own fireside, with no eyes, no thought, for any one except Diane. She made a deliberate tinkle in spreading out more spoons and ladles.
“I should think he would hate to go. I’m sure he does, at heart—because of Overton,” she said a little sharply. “He loved Overton so much that I know he’ll feel it when he follows again in the same trail. He can’t help it!”
Diane turned slowly and resumed her own task of undoing endless packages.
“I thought, at first, he wouldn’t go,” she admitted quietly in a colorless voice; “but then something seemed to draw him back. I suppose it’s the lure of the pole. And I—I felt he had to go to finish the work.”
“But it wasn’t his work!”