"Yes," said Peter slowly, "you—and people like you—will always call her back. But not this time, Ted—not this time. I'll help you with your rhetoric myself. Sheila has better things to think of just now." And putting his hands on the boy's shoulders, he turned him about for retreat.
It occurred to Peter then that he was fulfilling Mrs. Caldwell's trust, but he shook his head dubiously, nevertheless. He had saved one dream, but—the future was long and the people like Ted were many and intrepid. Suddenly he saw what life might do to a being like Sheila and something of the fear and tenderness that Mrs. Caldwell had felt smote upon his heart.
CHAPTER II
It was on a Saturday of late October that it happened—the adventure which, in after years, Sheila was to see as so significant.
Sheila and Ted had gone to the woods with a nutting-party—a party too merry to do much but frolic, and eat as they gathered. By afternoon their baskets were not nearly full, and Ted surveyed his own with chagrin. He liked to accomplish what he set out to do, not because he was particularly industrious, but because a sense of power within him, partly sheer physical vigor and partly a naturally dominant will, demanded deeds for its satisfaction. If he could stay an hour longer, if he could go a little deeper into the woods, he could fill his basket, he reflected; whereas now—and he looked with contempt and a genuine distress at his meagre store of hazel nuts.
In his discontent he had already lagged behind his companions. The other children had set their faces homeward; Sheila walked just ahead of him, her arm around the waist of Charlotte Davis, a girl of her own age whom she had taken, with solemn vows, for her dearest friend. He might call the two girls, he thought, and together they could soon have a fine harvest, but his inclination rejected Charlotte almost as quickly as the idea occurred to him. For Charlotte, with her pert little freckled nose and her shrewd blue eyes, was not a comrade to Ted's taste. She had never shown him a proper reverence, and he was at the stage when a boy desires feminine tribute even while he affects to scorn it.
Charlotte had never understood him. Or was it what he did not suspect—that she had always understood him too well? At any rate she had a disconcerting way of gazing at him, her head cocked impudently on one side, her eyes half speculative, half amused. And her sharp, teasing tongue was even more disconcerting than her naughty, quizzical stare. He could imagine, from past experience at her hands, what would happen now if he included her in his plan.
"What do you want of more nuts?" she would ask, with the inquiring innocence that he had learned to distrust. "Haven't you got all you can eat?"
"Yes, but—" he would begin to explain.