"How sorry Roger will be that he wasn't here to see him!" was her first thought. Her second was for Bunny. She turned, and stooped to pick up the doll—and lo! Bunny was not there.
High and low she searched, beneath grass tangles, under "juniper saucers," among the stems of the thickly massed blueberries and hardhacks, but nowhere was Bunny to be seen. She peered over the ledge, but nothing met her eyes below but a thick growth of blackish, stunted evergreens. This place "down below" had been a sort of terror to Hester's imagination always, as an entirely unknown and unexplored region; but in the cause of the beloved Bunny she was prepared to risk anything, and she bravely made ready to plunge into the depths.
It was not so easy to plunge, however. The cliff was ten or twelve feet in height where she stood, and ran for a considerable distance to right and left without getting lower. This way and that she quested, and at last found a crevice where it was possible to scramble down,—a steep little crevice, full of blackberry briers, which scratched her face and tore her frock. When at last she gained the lower bank, this further difficulty presented itself: she could not tell where she was. The evergreen thicket nearly met over her head, the branches got into her eyes, and buffeted and bewildered her. She could not make out the place where she had been sitting, and no signs of Bunny could be found. At last, breathless with exertion, tired, hot, and hopeless, she made her way out of the thicket, and went, crying, home to her mother.
She was still crying, and refusing to be comforted, when Roger came in from milking. He was sorry for Hester, but not so sorry as he would have been had his mind not been full of troubles of his own. He tried to console her with a vague promise of helping her to look for Bunny "some day when there wasn't so much to do." But this was cold comfort, and, in the end, Hester went to bed heartbroken, to sob herself to sleep.
"Mother," said Roger, after she had gone, "Jim Boies is going to his uncle's, in New Ipswich, in September, to do chores and help round a little, and to go all winter to the academy."
The New Ipswich Academy was quite a famous school then, and to go there was a great chance for a studious boy.
"That's a bit of good luck for Jim."
"Yes; first-rate."
"Not quite so first-rate for you."
"No" (gloomily). "I shall miss Jim. He's always been my best friend among the boys. But what makes me mad is that he doesn't care a bit about going. Mother, why doesn't good luck ever come to us Gales?"