Helen shook her head.
“I wouldn’t work that way. Say, you’re always chasing the boys up. Are they slacking worse than usual? Are they on the ‘buck’?”
Kate shot a swift glance into the gray eyes fixed on her so shrewdly.
“No,” she said quite soberly. “Only—only work’s good for folks, sometimes. The boys are all right. It just does me good to work. Besides, I like to know what Pete’s doing.”
“You mean——?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter what I mean,” Kate retorted, with a sudden impatience. “Where’s dinner?”
This was something of her sister’s mood more or less all the time, and Helen found it very trying. But she made every allowance for it, also the more readily as she watched the affairs of the church, and understood how surely they were upsetting to her sister through her belief in the old Indian legend of the fateful pine.
But Kate’s occasional outbursts of delirious excitement were far more difficult of understanding. Helen read them in the only way she understood. Her observation warned her that they generally followed talk of the doings of Inspector Fyles, or a distant view of him.
As the days went by Kate seemed more and more wrapped up in the work of the police. Every little item of news of them she hungrily devoured. And frequently she went out on long solitary rides, which Helen concluded were for the purpose of interested observation of their doings.
But all this display of interest was somewhat nullified by another curious phase in her sister. It quickly became obvious that she was endeavoring by every artifice to avoid coming into actual contact with Stanley Fyles. Somehow this did not seem to fit in with Helen’s idea of love, and again she found herself at a loss.