“Anyway you can’t tell me that there is anything whatsoever in England to compare with—that—for instance.”
Her quirt made an eloquent motion toward the west, along the complete horizon of which the long line of jagged peaks were silhouetted against the gilded skies.
“Righto!” said the man, softly and then after a pause he added almost gently, and as if he were recalling something to memory: “But I doubt if there’s anything rarer than our English country lanes—lawns—fine old places—the streams—but you must see it all some day.”
When he spoke, when he looked like that, with the faraway absent expression in his eyes. Hilda had a passionate sense of rebellion and resentment. For some reason she could not have explained she begrudged him his thought of England. It tormented her to think that the man beside her was homesick. Her quirt flicked above Daisy’s neck. A short swift gallop and back again to the lope of the cow ponies. The ride had whipped the colour into her cheeks and brought back the fire to her eyes. She was ready now with the burning questions that for days she had ached to have answered.
“If England’s such a remarkable place, why do you come to Canada to make a home for this—what was her name, did you say?”
“Her name? Oh, I see—you mean—Nanna.”
He said the name softly, almost tenderly, and Hilda’s breath came and went with the sudden surge of unreasonable fury that swept over her. He answered her lightly, deliberately begging the question.
“Why not? This is the p-p-promised land!”
“Are you making fun of Canada?” she demanded imperiously.
“No—never. I s-said that quite seriously.”
She shot her next question roughly. She was determined to know the exact relationship of this Nanna to the man beside her. Undoubtedly she was the woman of the locket, whose fair, lovely face Hilda was seeing in imagination too often these days for her peace of mind.
“Is she your sister?”
“Oh, no. No relation whatever. At least, no blood relation.”
“I see. I sup‑pose you think her very—pretty?”
“Lovely,” said Cheerio. Something had leaped into his eyes—something bright and eager. He leaned toward Hilda with the impulse to confide in her, but the look on the girl’s face repelled him, so that he drew back confounded and puzzled. Hilda set her little white teeth tightly together, put up her nose, and, with a toss of her head, said:
“For goodness sakes, let’s get home. Hi, Daisy! get a wiggle on you, you old poke.”
She was off on the last lap of the journey.
In her room, she faced herself in the wide mirror and revealed a remarkable circumstance so far as she was concerned. Tears, bitter and scorching, were running down her face. Clinching her hands, she said to the tear-stained vision in the mirror:
“It’s just because I hate him so! Oh, how I hate him. I never knew anyone in all the days of my life that I hated so much before and I’d give anything on earth if only I could just hurt him!”
Hurt him she did, for the following evening when he brought her horse, saddled and ready for her, to the front of the ranch house, Hilda, in the swinging couch on the verandah apparently deeply absorbed in a dictionary, looked up coolly, and inquired what the hell he was doing with her horse.
“Wh-why I th-th-thought you would be coming with us as usual,” said the surprised Cheerio.
“No thank you, and I’m quite able to saddle my own horse when I want to go,” said Hilda, and returned to a deep perusal of the dictionary. But the crestfallen and puzzled Cheerio did not see her, as on tiptoe, she stole around the side of the house, to catch a last glimpse of him as he rode out with Sandy beside him. Her cheeks were hot and her eyes humid with undropped tears as over the still evening air her brother’s shrill young voice floated:
“Hilda not coming! Gee! we’re in luck! Now we can go over the cliff!”
Hilda didn’t care just then whether that brother of hers went over the cliff or not. She felt forsaken, bitter, ill-used and extremely unhappy and forlorn. But she had had her last ride in the magical evenings on a dinosaur quest.
VII
“Say, Hilda, guess what I found today? I didn’t reckernize it at first until he said it was his. Viper rooted it up right under his window outside the bunkhouse. Well, I found that picture of his girl that he keeps in that locket. It must’ve slipped out, and Viper nearly chewed it up. So I yipped to him to come on out and I give it up to him and I says: ‘Whose her nibs anyway,’ and he says: ‘Someone I used to know,’ and I says: ‘Don’t you know her still?’ and he says: ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ and he was lookin’ just as if he wasn’t hearin’ a word I was saying and he says as if he was talking to himself; ‘She was to have been my wife, you know.’ Just like that. Then he got up and he looked kind of queer, and he went on inside and come on out again with that locket in his hand and he sits down beside me on the steps and smokes without saying a word. So then I said, just to kid him: ‘Say, I’ll give you two of my buffalow skulls for that bit of dinky tin,’ meaning the locket, and he dumps his pipe and gives me the laugh and he says: ‘Nothing doing, old man. The sweetest girl in the world is enshined’—that’s what he said—‘right inside that “dinky bit of tin”!’ ”
VIII
Sitting in
