Monday morning, Mr. Ashe left for the West; and the next day, the new term began.

“It’ll seem odd, not going to Miss Rankin’s room,” Blue Bonnet said, overtaking Debby on the way to school. “I wonder if she’ll miss us.”

“Some of us,” Debby suggested.

“Alec says, Miss Fellows is ever so jolly.”

“She hasn’t been at it so long,” Debby commented. “Are you taking French, Blue Bonnet?”

Blue Bonnet nodded. “It has to be that, or German, hasn’t it? Aunt Lucinda thought I’d better choose French this year. I’ve studied it some; one of the tutors instituted an hour’s conversation every day, just after dinner; there used to be—interruptions.”

Blue Bonnet came home that afternoon most enthusiastic; Miss Fellows was all she ought to be, she shouldn’t have a bit of trouble with her.

“And does the lady in question feel confident regarding you?” Mrs. Clyde asked.

Blue Bonnet laughed. “She hasn’t said—yet. It’s ever so big a class, Grandmother; there were a lot of left-overs. French is three times a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—Mademoiselle looks awfully nice! Sarah and Amanda are taking German—isn’t it just like Sarah to choose the hardest? All the rest of us club members are taking French—Kitty says she wants to learn how to take ‘French leave’ and, oh, me, I promised not to be five minutes—they’re all waiting down at the back gate for me.”

Blue Bonnet dropped her strap of books, ran for her skates, paid a visit to the cookie jar in the pantry, patted Solomon, and with a “Good-bye, Grandmother,” was off, leaving Mrs. Clyde feeling as if a small whirlwind had swept through the quiet house.

What with school, her afternoons on the pond, her evenings of study, broken by occasional neighborhood gatherings, Blue Bonnet found the time slipping by very fast. While she missed her uncle greatly, she was learning more and more how much can be done by letter-writing, and those were far from doleful letters that traveled every week from Woodford to the far-away Texas ranch.

The weather held wonderfully; never had the pond been in better condition than during those January days.

“But the thaw’s bound to come before long,” Debby predicted one afternoon.

“The snow’s coming first!” Susy pointed to the clouds banking themselves up above the low line of hills—“Coming before to-morrow morning, too.”

“Let’s not go in just yet!” Blue Bonnet pleaded, as Susy bent to unfasten her straps.

“But it’s time!”

“You’re such a prompt-to-the-minute girl, Susy Doyle!” Blue Bonnet objected. “I’m not ready to go—are you, Kitty?”

“You never are ready,” Debby protested. They four were the only club members out that afternoon; as Debby insisted later, if only Sarah had been there it would never have happened.

“I’d like to start right off now and skate and skate without stopping, until I got to the end of the pond!” Blue Bonnet declared.

“But no one ever does skate up at the upper end of the pond,” Susy explained; “the ice is always rough up there; besides, it isn’t safe in ever so many spots.”

“Anyhow, I’d like to try it.” Blue Bonnet was in the mood for adventure; wasn’t it Friday afternoon? “I mean to ask Alec to go with me.”

“He’s playing hockey!” Kitty said, looking at a group of boys down beyond. “He wouldn’t take you if he wasn’t—nor let you go,” she added mischievously.

“I don’t see how he could very well help that,” Blue Bonnet retorted. “I believe I’ll try it alone.” “Blue Bonnet!” Susy gasped.

“I’d like awfully well to see you!” Kitty teased, in what Amanda called her “aggravating tone.”

“Is that a dare?” Blue Bonnet demanded.

“If you like to call it one.”

Blue Bonnet bent to tighten her skates.

“Blue Bonnet Ashe!” Debby exclaimed. “Are you clean daft! Start up there at this time of the evening—when you ought to be going home?”

“You don’t know how far it is,” Susy urged.

“No—but I’m going to find out,” Blue Bonnet said.

“Don’t worry, Susy,” Kitty remarked; “she won’t go very far.”

Blue Bonnet’s eyes flashed. “I’ll go as far as you will, Kitty Clark!”

“‘Is that a dare?’” Kitty quoted; she, too, bent to tighten her skates. “Come on!” she said; and before Debby or Susy realized it the two were off.

“Of all the—” Debby took a few steps, then came back to where Susy still stood, her skates in her hand. “Kitty, or Blue Bonnet, alone, one might manage to do something with—but together! Come on, Susy—it’s no use our standing here in the cold; perhaps they’ll turn around presently. Kitty knows she’s no right letting Blue Bonnet go up there after dark.”

“Shall we go tell some of the boys?” Susy asked. But the boys were far down at the other end by now, fighting an exciting game to a finish. The pond had been thinning rapidly the last half hour, for, with the coming of night, a cold wind had sprung up.

Debby shivered. “It wouldn’t be much use; by the time we got them those two foolish girls would be out of call. It’s all that Kitty’s fault! She just dared Blue Bonnet on.”

At first, Blue Bonnet thoroughly enjoyed that swift rush along through the gathering dusk; they had the wind at their back, and ahead of them the pond to themselves. Then the two hours or more already spent in skating that afternoon began to tell on her, and with the sense of fast-growing fatigue came equally rapid misgivings. She glanced sideways at her companion; why wouldn’t Kitty speak! If only she would admit the foolishness of the undertaking, Blue Bonnet would give in too, but until Kitty gave in—she would not.

Kitty was thinking the same; she knew, as Blue Bonnet did not, not only the foolishness, but the risk of what they had undertaken. What had possessed her to start such a ball rolling? Once started, it went without saying that she could not be the first to throw up the game. Blue Bonnet was getting tired already, one could see that, though she was trying not to show it; and then—

But Kitty reckoned without knowledge. The pond was growing narrower now, with sharp twists and turns that made Blue Bonnet think of the brook she and Alec had followed that August afternoon. The thought of the brook reminded her of Aunt Lucinda.

For just a moment, Blue Bonnet wavered; Aunt Lucinda had gone into town and would not be back until the nine o’clock train—Grandmother was alone, and would be worried.

Kitty saw the sudden slackening on Blue Bonnet’s part, and took comfort from it. “Ready to go back?” she asked, more than a hint of “I told you how it would be” in her voice.

Blue Bonnet wavered no longer; it was impossible to give in to Kitty—of all people; Kitty had started it, and it was her place to make the first move towards turning back.

“I am ready whenever you are,” she answered; “you have only to say the word.”

“I thought you wanted to go to the very end?”

Blue Bonnet made no answer. Kitty was the—Sarah would never be so horrid; and then the mere thought of Sarah in connection with such a foolish performance as this, made Blue Bonnet laugh.

So the two pushed doggedly on through the fast-deepening dusk, stumbling more than once against snags; tired, cold, hungry, and miserable, and with the discouraging knowledge that every moment was taking them further from home. It seemed to Blue Bonnet as if the pond had no end, but was like some dreary, enchanted lake in the fairy stories; that she and Kitty, like the brook, must go on and on forever. It did not seem possible that it could be the same pond she and the others had skated on so gaily that afternoon—if it really was that afternoon.

It was quite dark by now. Far away, across the fields, a solitary light showed in some lonely farmhouse window, and now and then they caught the sound of a dog barking.

It wouldn’t have been so unbearable, Blue Bonnet thought, if only Kitty would speak.

And then Kitty did speak—“We shall have to keep close to the bank from now on—the ice isn’t safe further out—that is, unless you want to go back?” No one should say that she had not given Blue Bonnet every opportunity to behave like a reasonable being.

“Do you?” Blue Bonnet asked.

In her heart, Kitty knew herself more than ready, but the little demon that had seemed hovering near her all the afternoon, prompted her to say, “We haven’t got to the end yet. I thought—”

On they went again, both too tired to skate at all fast. Kitty told herself that she would never dare anyone like Blue Bonnet Ashe again; it had proved a veritable boomerang of a dare. Blue Bonnet felt that once she had got her skates off, she should never want to see them again. While the realization that ahead of them both waited a probable very bad quarter of an hour, did not serve to make things any brighter.

And then a little group of bare trees loomed tall and shadowy almost in front of them, and, a moment later, the end of the pond was reached.

“I know now,” Blue Bonnet dropped wearily down on the snowy bank, “how Miss Rankin’s beloved Pilgrim Fathers felt when they landed on Plymouth Rock!”

“You mustn’t do that!” Kitty commanded. “Get up this moment.”

“I simply can’t—just yet. Only I don’t suppose our motive and theirs for setting out were precisely similar, do you, Kitty?”

“I’m not supposing anything about it! Will you get up? Or do you want to catch the worst cold you’ve ever had—and have everyone saying it was my fault?”

“I don’t see how they could say that,” Blue Bonnet got up reluctantly. “I suppose our next move—is to go back.”

“We can’t go back on the ice—it’s too dark and the wind would be dead against us all the way.”

Blue Bonnet began working at her skates. “I’m mighty glad of that!”

“Going ’cross lots through the snow won’t be exactly what you might call fun,” Kitty remarked. “Come on—I don’t know what time we’ll get home, as it is.”

“Let’s not have ‘Quaker meeting’ going home, Kitty,” Blue Bonnet begged.

“It won’t be ‘Quaker meeting’—once we do get home, I’m thinking,” Kitty answered; “and I just know mamma will be worried to death.”

“Kitty, why did we do it?” Blue Bonnet asked.

“Maybe we’d better not go into that at present,” Kitty suggested. “There—it’s beginning to snow!”

It certainly was, in a thorough-going, determined fashion that promised to last through the night, at the least.

Walking ’cross lots after dark through ankle-deep snow, with the storm beating in one’s face, was not a particularly pleasant way of passing the time, Blue Bonnet decided. “Kitty Clark!” she burst out. “If ever you dare dare me again!”

Kitty laughed. “You didn’t have to take it!”

“You knew I would!”

Kitty pulled off her mittens, blowing on her numbed fingers. “Well, I got paid in kind, didn’t I? Blue Bonnet, you mustn’t!” For Blue Bonnet had slipped her muff off, throwing the chain over Kitty’s head.

“Turn and turn about!” she insisted.

“Are you—too utterly fagged out?” Kitty asked presently, real concern in her voice, as Blue Bonnet stumbled, just saving herself from falling.

“I’m—a bit tired,” Blue Bonnet confessed. “I suppose it’s because I’m not so used to this sort of thing!” She wondered if Kitty really did know her way through the dark and storm; to all outward seeming, they were struggling aimlessly on across fields that had apparently no boundaries. They had left the friendly little light behind long since; it seemed as if she and Kitty were quite alone in a world of wind and snow.

All at once, she came to an abrupt stop. “Kitty, I’ve got to rest!” She dropped down on the snow in a forlorn little heap.

Kitty longed to follow suit; instead, she gave Blue Bonnet a little shake. “Blue Bonnet, get up immediately! We’re nearly to the road now; it won’t be half as hard walking then.”

“I don’t think I care very much whether we are near the road or not,” Blue Bonnet said wearily; “all I want is to sit still for a while.”

“Blue Bonnet, please! Haven’t you and I both had enough of doing what we want for one day?”

“I’ve had more than enough,” Blue Bonnet conceded readily, but she did not get up.

Kitty gave her a second shake, and a harder one. “Blue Bonnet! I got you into this, and I’ve got to get you out of it! Get up this moment! Think how worried they must be at home about us!”

“Grandmother will be worried,” Blue Bonnet agreed. “Aunt Lucinda isn’t at home; but I don’t seem to mind about that, either, now—I’m so tired.”

“Then I’ll sit down too!” Kitty dropped down beside Blue Bonnet. “I might as well sit as stand.”

Blue Bonnet roused herself impatiently. “What a provoking girl you are! Come on, then! Only you might let me rest.”

Kitty drew a deep sigh of thankfulness when, a few yards further on, they stumbled against the last fence, over which the snow was drifting fast. “It won’t be nearly so hard now,” she repeated, as they managed to scramble over it into the road.

A moment or so later, Kitty cried eagerly—“Blue Bonnet, listen!”

From down the road came the jingling of bells, coming nearer every moment; then a voice called, “Halloa! Halloa, there! Anyone about?”

“It’s Jim Parker!” Kitty cried joyously. “Here we are!” she called back.

“Well of all the tom-fool scrapes!” Jim drew his horse up with a jerk. “What do you mean by this, Kitty Clark! Setting the whole place by the ears!”

“It was just as much my fault!” Blue Bonnet protested. “Well, we won’t stand here scrapping about that!” Jim bundled the two into the bottom of the box sleigh most unceremoniously, piling buffalo robes thick about them. “There’s blame enough to go shares on and have some left over.”

“Please don’t scold!” Kitty pleaded. “We’re dreadfully sorry, and if you knew how tired and hungry we were!”

Jim took up the reins—“And so you ought to be!” He was a big, hearty fellow of twenty, who had been pulling Kitty out of scrapes ever since she had been big enough to get into them,—and Kitty had begun early.

“How did you know where we were,—did Debby tell?” Kitty asked. Blue Bonnet cared neither to ask, nor answer questions.

“Why,” Jim explained, “when you didn’t come home your mother sent over to our place, thinking you must be there. Amanda hadn’t seen you since school; then Mrs. Clyde sent her Delia down to your place, in search of Blue Bonnet. Debby’d gone out to supper with Susy, and by the time we’d got ’round to the Doyles and found out where you had started for, it was getting pretty late, and some of the seniors were more or less anxious. Your father hadn’t got in yet. Some of the boys started up the pond with lanterns, and I came this way, thinking it barely possible you might have developed enough sense not to try to come back on the ice.” “Is everyone dreadfully worried?” Kitty asked.

“Worried enough! That end of the pond isn’t the safest place, particularly after dark.”

Kitty subsided. When Jim, who was her staunch ally, used that tone towards her, matters must be pretty serious.

Never had the lights of the village, blinking at them through the snow, seemed more friendly or more welcome to the two nestled under the buffalo robes in the bottom of the Parker box sleigh.

Jim was blowing the horn he had brought, three good blasts.

“That means we’re found!” Kitty’s voice was trembling; some realization of what those blasts meant to those here at home had come to her.

Blue Bonnet roused herself. “Kitty, didn’t it almost seem—out there—in the snow—”

“Don’t!” Kitty dropped her face on Blue Bonnet’s shoulder.

It was not at all the sort of welcome they should have received, Dr. Clark declared afterwards; but then, as Kitty pointed out, he was the first to reach the sleigh—having heard the news on his way home—taking her into his own cutter, and on home to an exceedingly anxious mother, while Jim turned into the Clyde drive.

There Solomon met them, scrambling into the sleigh, and diving in among the robes, licking his mistress’ face, her ears—only stopping, momentarily, to bark in most ungrateful manner at Jim in his great fur coat.

“Here we are! All safe and sound!” Jim said, cheerily, as Mrs. Clyde came forward from the open doorway, just within which, Delia and Katie hovered excitedly. It was Delia’s and Katie’s firm conviction that “that Kitty” was to blame for the whole affair, it being “just like her.”

The next thing Blue Bonnet knew, Jim was carrying her indoors, robes and all, depositing her in the big armchair Grandmother drew forward. “There!” he said. “You’re home now and it’s up to someone to keep you here for one while!”

Blue Bonnet tried to say thank you, but made rather a failure of it; it was all she could do just then to fight back a sudden desire to cry. It was so good to be at home again—where it was warm and light and there were people about.

Grandmother seemed to understand, for she asked no questions; and before many minutes Blue Bonnet found herself in bed, with hot water bottles everywhere.

And then, quite unexpectedly, the doctor appeared; explaining that he thought he would look in and see how this second member of the exploring party was getting on.

“I’m all right!” Blue Bonnet told him, as he took her hand in his. “Please, Dr. Clark, it was my fault—not Kitty’s!” “Time enough to-morrow to discuss that side of the question,” the doctor said. “What you’ve got to do now is to get in all the sleep you can.”

Blue Bonnet looked up at him with troubled eyes. “But every time I shut my eyes, I keep seeing—” she broke, abruptly.

“We’ll soon remedy that!” the doctor answered, taking out his medicine case.

“You are all so good to me!” Blue Bonnet told Grandmother, when the doctor had gone. “And you shouldn’t be, because—”

“We won’t go into that ‘because’ to-night, dear,” Mrs. Clyde bent to kiss the flushed face. “You must go to sleep now, as the doctor said.”

It was still snowing when Blue Bonnet woke the next morning. Down below, the hall clock was striking nine. It was a good thing that it was Saturday, Blue Bonnet thought; she felt stiff and tired. She wondered if Aunt Lucinda had been kept in town by the storm. Aunt Lucinda would have the right to be vexed with her this time; Blue Bonnet moved restlessly—she didn’t want to think about last night. Why, someone must have slept over there on her lounge! Surely, Grandmother hadn’t—Aunt Lucinda was coming upstairs now.

“Have you been awake long, Blue Bonnet?” Miss Lucinda asked. She sat down on the side of the bed, laying a hand over the one Blue Bonnet held out to her; she looked grave, but not at all—lectury, Blue Bonnet decided.

“I only just woke up, I’ll get right up,” the girl said.

Miss Lucinda shook her head. “Breakfast first, and then—if the doctor says you may—we’ll talk about the getting up.”

“But I don’t need the doctor!” Blue Bonnet protested.

She had little appetite for the daintily prepared breakfast Miss Lucinda brought her presently. “I ought not to have these dishes this morning,” she insisted, touching the pretty sprigged cup and saucer,—“I ought not to have anything nice.”

Miss Lucinda smiled. “Dr. Clark has been known to give very unpleasant doses; it is possible that he may give you something very far from nice.”

“I hope he says I may get up,” Blue Bonnet said. “I hate lying in bed.”

“Then it should prove excellent discipline,” Miss Lucinda suggested, shaking out her pillow and making her comfortable in a way Blue Bonnet found very pleasant.

“Did you sleep in here on the lounge last night, Aunt Lucinda?” she asked.

“Yes,” Miss Lucinda answered; she was putting the room to rights now. Blue Bonnet watched her interestedly. “How easily you do things—so quickly and without a bit of fuss,” she said. “There comes the doctor—I know he’ll say I’m foolish—lying here.”

What the doctor said, among other things, was that, in his opinion, Woodford had the unenviable distinction at that moment of containing two as headstrong and foolish young persons as it had ever been his lot to run across. And he ended by prescribing a day’s quiet in bed for Blue Bonnet; after which, he and Aunt Lucinda went downstairs together.

“A little cold, a good deal of fatigue, and considerable nervous excitement,” the doctor told Mrs. Clyde and Miss Lucinda. “She isn’t as rugged as some of our Woodford girls,” he added, “and this is her first New England winter. Quiet and coddling will bring her around all right.”

“And Kitty?” Mrs. Clyde inquired.

“Tired, and I trust—penitent,” Kitty’s father answered.

Blue Bonnet slept most of the day, Solomon mounting guard on the rug beside her bed. According to calculation, it should have been Saturday, but never had Solomon known his mistress to spend Saturday in such peculiar fashion before.

When Blue Bonnet finally awoke, towards late afternoon, feeling wonderfully rested, she found Grandmother sitting before the fire, her sewing lying idly in her lap. She looked tired and troubled, Blue Bonnet told herself, and it was all her fault.

“Grandmother,”—Blue Bonnet sat up in bed, shaking her hair back from her face—“please, I am ever and ever so sorry! About last night—it was just a foolish dare that I took up—and was too obstinate to let drop. I don’t believe, in the beginning, Kitty really meant it for a dare; she was only teasing. And I might have gone, even if she hadn’t gone too, but she wouldn’t have gone without me. So it was a good deal more my fault than hers. Once we’d got started, neither of us would give in. And then—afterwards, all the way home through the dark—I kept thinking of what happened last summer—out on the ranch; and seeing it all over again; and remembering what Uncle Joe said—how it need never have happened, if the poor, foolish fellow had had the grit enough not to take a dare. You see, one of the other cowboys dared him to ride that horse, and he would do it—though Uncle Joe warned him not to.”

“It should not have taken much ‘grit’ not to take Kitty’s dare last night, Blue Bonnet,” Mrs. Clyde said, gravely. “A moment’s thought should have been enough to deter you.”

“Somehow, I never do seem to do my thinking until afterwards,” Blue Bonnet mourned.

“But ‘afterwards,’ when there had been plenty of time for thought, you still went on.” “Y—yes,” Blue Bonnet admitted, “but it didn’t seem as if I could give in before Kitty did, Grandmother.”

“It is not so many years ago, Blue Bonnet,” Grandmother said, “that a party of young people went skating up at that end of the pond, against orders, and that one of them did not come back with the rest.”

“Grandmother! And you had that to think about—all last evening!”

“Yes, Blue Bonnet.”

“I—hate myself! I’ll never take such a silly dare as that was last night again!”

“It is my experience,” Grandmother observed, “that most dares come under that description.”

When Aunt Lucinda came up just before supper, bringing messages from various friends, and a little knot of lemon verbena and heliotrope from Sarah’s window garden, she found Blue Bonnet looking very sober.

“We shall not have to keep you prisoner to-morrow, my dear,” Miss Lucinda said. “I expect we shall have numerous callers, even if it is Sunday.”

Blue Bonnet laid Sarah’s flowers against her face. “I’m sorry the club couldn’t meet—it’s the first time we’ve missed since starting.” For a moment or two, she lay looking across at her aunt in the low chair before the fire; then she asked, suddenly, “Aunt Lucinda, aren’t you going to—say anything to me?”

“Say anything, Blue Bonnet?”

“About—last night?”

“Haven’t you and your grandmother talked things over, Blue Bonnet?”

“Yes,” Blue Bonnet answered, “but Grandmother was just—dear, and I thought—I don’t mean that you’re not—” Blue Bonnet colored, “only it does seem as if someone ought to—scold me. It was so horrid of me.”

Miss Lucinda half smiled. “And you consider that my especial prerogative? No, Blue Bonnet, I am not going to ‘say anything,’ as you express it, to you. I am going to ask that another time you will give a little thought to the worry and anxiety your heedlessness is likely to cause other people. I do not think you realize how troubled your grandmother was last evening.”

“Oh, I will try,” Blue Bonnet’s voice trembled. “I will, I truly will, Aunt Lucinda!”

“Solomon,” she confided to him later, as they two were alone in the firelight, “Solomon, Aunt Lucinda can be such a dear!”