Then suddenly Elliott Cameron did a strange thing. By this time she had shaken off Stannard and had betaken herself and her disgust to the edge of the woods. She was so very miserable that she didn't know herself and she knew herself less than ever in this next act. Alone in the woods, as she thought, with only moss underfoot and high green boughs overhead, Elliott lifted her foot and deliberately and with vehemence stamped it. "I don't like things!" she whispered, a little shocked at her own words. "I don't _like_ things!"
Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.
For a minute the hot color flooded the girl's face. But she seized the bull by the horns. "I am cross," she said, "frightfully cross!" And she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he had never seen so attractive a girl.
"Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?"
"Everything, with my part of it." What possessed her, she wondered afterward, to say what she said next? "I never wanted to come here."
"That so? We've been thinking it rather nice."
In spite of herself, she was mollified. "It isn't quite that, either," she explained. "I've only just discovered the real trouble, myself. What makes me so mad isn't altogether the fact that I didn't want to come up here. It's that I hadn't any choice. I _had_ to come."
The boy's eyes twinkled. "So that's what's bothering you, is it? Cheer up! You had the choice of _how_ you'd come, didn't you?"
"Yes. Sometimes I think that's all the choice they give us in this world. It's all I've had, anyway--how I'd do a thing."
"Hello!" said Stannard's voice. "What are you two chinning about before the cows come home?"
"You don't want to have much to do with that fellow," said Stannard, when Bruce Fearing had gone on about whatever business he had in hand.
"Why not?" Elliott's tone was short. She had wanted to hear what Bruce was going to say.
"Oh, he is all right, enough, I guess, but nobody knows where he came from. He and that Pete brother of his are no relations of ours, or of Aunt Jessica's either."
"How does he happen to be living here, then?"
"Search me. Some kind of a pick-up, I gathered. Nobody talks much about it. They take him as a matter of course. All right enough for them, if they want to, but they really ought to warn strangers. A fellow would think he was--er--all right, you know."