But the excitement was short-lived owing to a circumstance which the wind had overlooked. The wind had made a mistake in its direction, and so the fire had one wild, glorious race up the bank only to find its nose run right into a freshly ploughed fire-guard, steaming damp and richly brown. The fire sputtered, choked and died down, black and disappointed, leaving only a few smoking clumps of willows.
Then the wind, seeing no further chance of trouble, went crackling away over the tree tops, and the sun came back, brilliant and warm as ever, and there was nothing to show that there had been any excitement, save only the waves on the lake. The wind was gone, laughing and unrepentant, over the tree-tops; the sun had come back as genially as if it had never been away—but the lake could not forget, and it fretted and complained, in a perfectly human way, pounding the bank in a futile attempt to get back at some one. The bank had not been to blame, but it had to take the lake's repinings, while the real culprit went free and unreproached.
Pearl could tell what the lake was saying, as it lashed itself foaming and pounding just below her feet. It called to the world to listen.
"Look how I'm used," it sobbed, "and abused—and confused."
Pearl put her hands in the silk-lined pockets of her coat, and thought about what she had just seen.
"Life is like this," she said at last, "human nature is full of mischief. It loves to start trouble and fan a fire into a destructive mood; and there's only one way to stop it—plough a fire-guard. I wish there had been some one here to plough a fire-guard when the fires of gossip began to run here three years ago."
"I'll go now and dress up, and break the news to the neighborhood that I am going to the house at Purple Springs to board. There will be a row—there will be a large row—unless I can make the people understand, and in a row there is nothing so sustaining as good clothes—next to the consciousness of being right, of course," she added after a pause. An hour later, Pearl Watson, in her best dress of brown silk, with her high brown boots well polished, and her small brown hat, made by herself, with a band of crushed burnt orange poppies around the crown, safely anchored and softened by a messaline drape; with her hair drawn over the tops of her ears, and a smart fawn summer coat, with buttons which showed a spot of red like a pigeon-blood ruby. Pearl looked at herself critically in the glass:
"These things should not count," she said, as she fastened a thin veil over her face and made it very neat at the back with a hairpin, "but they do."