“Did!”
“Did—could bother a man like Parson Hunt.”
“I am not so sure of that,” Betty rejoined, eyeing the other girl keenly.
But Nell Blossom, if she had a secret, hid it successfully. Betty did not miss the opportunity, however, of trying to help her friend.
“Suppose you learn some better songs—some really worth-while pieces? I brought my music with me, although I do not know if I shall ever touch a piano again.” She sighed. “But I sometimes sit and hum over my favorites. You read music of course, Nell?”
“I don’t know a note—to speak the name of it, I mean,” confessed the singer. “But I never saw the piece yet that I couldn’t pick up pretty easy. Rosabell Pickett says I’m a natural sight-reader with a great ear for harmony.”
She accepted with gratitude the selections Betty made from her library. Betty had chosen the songs with some little guile. That fact was proved by what occurred later.
“Anyway,” Nell concluded, “I ain’t going back to Colorado’s place for a while. I got some money, and Sam’s bringing his pay home to Mother Tubbs pretty reg’lar now. I can live for a while without singing for those roughnecks, that’s a sure thing!”
But Betty had her own grave thoughts—thoughts that kept her awake at night. Hollow eyes and certain twitching lines about her sensitive mouth were the result of these secret cogitations. Hunt noticed his sister’s changed appearance but he misunderstood its source. He feared that Betty found the life at Canyon Pass, with winter coming on, too hard to bear. Yet he saw that she always cheered up when Joe Hurley ran in to see them.
The Eastern girl’s trouble did not arise from the locality in which she was forced to live; it was the presence of one person in the town that caused her such serious thoughts. The man who had passed Nell Blossom and her in the storm, whose unexpected appearance had made Nell faint, had shocked Betty much more deeply than he did the singer!