"I guess I'll go on," she said, a hint of abandon in her voice.
"Well, good-by, hon," said Katherine, meekly taking her leave. "I will get about as much more of this as I want going back, but I hope you have a nice time--and--and end up at tea somewhere just as we were going to."
"Tea by myself would be horrid," Peggy called after her. "I won't be long, but I just must have some more, I love it so."
Then she turned her face to the snow-shoe tracks, and with a little gay song on her lips took up their trail.
"I'm Robinson Crusoe," she told herself blithely, "and these tracks are the good man Friday's. And we are the only two people that there are at all, and both of us have been finding it so lonely by ourselves."
Several of the Andrews girls had snow-shoes and Peggy wondered which one the maker of these tracks might be.
"I'll try to walk right in her steps," Peggy decided, "and then I'll get just the right method--but, oh, my goodness, what a tall girl she must be! These footprints are so far apart I can't possibly take such long steps. She must be a wonderful snow-shoeist--maybe she won't want to walk with me even when I do catch up to her, since she's apparently so much more expert."
With ludicrous attempts to fit her steps into those of Friday, she pursued her way until at last she had climbed the hill where the tracks had at first been lost, and there they were continuing, forever, it seemed.
Without hesitation Peggy followed. Lost to all but the exhilaration of a brand new exercise, and the stimulus of the cold wind that yet never chilled her glowing face, she kept on until Andrews was a thing of the past, and she could not have found her way back except for the tracks she was making now. And then all of a sudden she noticed something was different. The footprints no longer gleamed in her eyes, and the beautiful dazzle of the snow was blotted out. In an instant more a whirling mass of moist snow flakes was falling about her, obscuring everything but their own fantastic, falling selves.
"Well," decided she promptly, "I guess I'll be getting back."
But when she turned back the wind came rushing in her face and took her breath and nearly blew her down.
"Well," she changed her mind. "I guess I won't. Friday, where are you--you must be somewhere out in this sudden storm, too. And if I could only find you I wouldn't feel as lost and shaky as I do now. Misery loves company--not that I'm miserable--but something"--she choked back a sob, "something seems to be gloomy in my heart."