“He didn’t miss smashing us twenty seconds,” Hollister said. “As it was, that’s no kind of snowstorm to be out in without an umbrella and overshoes.”
Betty looked at him and smiled faintly. It was all very well to joke about it now, but they had missed being killed by a hair’s breadth. It made her sick to think of that cackling little demon up there on the bluff plotting wholesale murder and almost succeeding in his plan. She lived over again with a bleak sinking of the heart that five minutes when she had not known whether Tug Hollister was dead or alive.
If he had been killed! She knew herself now. Justin’s instinct of selfishness had been right, after all. His niggardliness resolved itself into self-protection. He had been fighting for his own. Even his jealousy stood justified. She had talked largely of friendship, had deceived herself into thinking that it was expression of herself she craved. That was true in a sense, but the more immediate blinding truth was that she loved Hollister. It had struck her like a bolt of lightning.
She felt as helpless as a drowning man who has ceased struggling.
CHAPTER XXXII
WITHOUT RHYME OR REASON
It was an upsetting thing, this that had happened to Betty, as decided and far less explainable than a chemical reaction. It seemed to her as though life had suddenly begun to move at tremendous speed, without any warning to her whatever that Fate intended to step on the accelerator. She was caught in the current of a stream of emotion sweeping down in flood. Though it gave her a great thrill, none the less it was devastating.
She wanted to escape, to be by herself behind a locked door, where she could sit down, find herself again, and take stock of the situation. To sit beside this stranger who had almost in the twinkling of an eye become of amazing import to her, to feel unavoidable contact of knee and elbow and shoulder, magnetic currents of attraction flowing, was almost more than she could bear.
Betty talked, a little, because silence became too significant. She felt a sense of danger, as though the personality, the individuality she had always cherished, were being dissolved in the gulf where she was sinking. But what she said, what Hollister replied, she could never afterward remember.
Ruth ran to meet them with excited little screams of greeting. “Hoo-hoo, Daddy! Hoo-hoo, Betty! Oh, goody, goody!”
Her sister was out of the sled and had the child in her arms almost before the horses had stopped. “You darling darling!” she cried.