Elizabeth laughed.
"That's the way you worship me," she answered. "I suspected it was a strange kind of adoration, largely made up of snubbing."
"It's not snubbing," retorted Katie, "it is trying to rouse you to what you you might be. But I am wasting my breath; you don't believe a word I say."
"I should like to believe it," returned the girl, smiling a little sadly. "But even if I did believe every word of it, it would seem to me a great deal nicer to be like you, beautiful all the time, and one whom everybody loves. But there's one thing to be said, if it were I who were beautiful, I could'nt have the pleasure I do in looking at you, and perhaps, after all, I shouldn't get any more enjoyment out of it."
"Oh, yes, you would," retorted the other, then bit her lips angrily at her inadvertence. A shrewd smile flitted over Elizabeth's face, but she made no comment, and Katie went on hurriedly to ask, "What shall we do to amuse ourselves to-day, Betsey?" Another slight movement of the hearer's lips responded. This name was Katie's special term of endearment, and never used except when they were alone; no one else ever called her by it.
"I don't know," she said. "Let us sit here as we are doing now. Move your chair nearer the window and look down on the river. See the blue-black shadows on it. And look at the forests, how they stretch away with a few clearings here and there. A city behind us, to be sure, a little city, but before us the forests, and the Indians. I wonder what it all means for us."
"The axe for one, the gun for the other," retorted Katie with a hardness which belief in the savageness and treachery of the red man had instilled into the age. "The forests mean fortune to some of us," she added.
"Yes," answered Elizabeth slowly, finding an unsatisfactory element in her companion's summary.
"Do you mean that we shall have to shoot down a whole race? That is dreadful," she added after a pause.
"You and I have nothing to do with all that," returned Katie.