“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.

Elizabeth waited in despair of putting the case as she felt it.

“I was thinking,” she said at last, “that if we have a whole land of forests to cut down and of cities to build up, somehow, everything will be different here from the Old England.  I often wonder what it is to be in this New World.  It must be unlike the Old,” she repeated.

“I don’t wonder,” returned Katie, “and that’s just what you shouldn’t do.  Wonder what you’re going to wear to-morrow when we dine at Aunt Faith’s, or whether Master Harwin will call this morning, or Master Waldo, or wonder about something sensible.”

“Which means, ‘or if it’s to be Master Archdale,’” retorted Elizabeth, smiling into the laughing eyes fixed upon her face, and making them fall at the keenness of her glance, while a brighter rose than Katie cared to show tinted the creamy skin and made her bend a moment to arrange the rosette of her slipper.  The movement showed her hair in all its perfection, for at this early hour it had not been tortured into elaborateness, but as she sat in her bedroom talking with her guest, was loosely coiled to be out of the way, and thus drawn back in its wavy abundance showed now burnished, and now a darker brown, as the sunlight or the shadow fell upon it.

“He’s not always sensible,” she answered, lifting her head again with a half defiant gesture, and smiling.  Katie’s smile was irresistible, it won her admirers by the score, not altogether because it gave a glimpse of beautiful teeth, or because her mouth was at its perfection then, but that it was an expression of childlike abandonment to the spirit of the moment, which charmed the gay because they sympathized with it and the serious because it was a mood of mind into which they would be glad to enter.  “Stephen has not been quite himself lately, rather stupid,” and she looked as if she were not unsuspicious of the reason.