“Jean, look at me,” said Kit suddenly.  “Will you tell me something, honest and true?”

“I think mother’s calling.”  Jean’s voice was rather hurried, as she started for the door.

“No, she isn’t any such thing.  I want to know if you and Ralph are engaged.  I don’t see why you should try to keep it a secret when everybody thinks you are anyway.  And a wedding in the family would be so exciting.”

But Jean shook her head, coloring quickly, and hurried down-stairs, with only a laugh for an answer.  Kit stared out of the window, rather resentfully.  She would be sixteen in November, and Jean was past eighteen.  Eighteen loomed ahead of her as a year of discretion, a time when you naturally came into your heritage of mature reason and common sense.  She remembered once the Dean remarking that the human brain did not reach its full development until eighteen, and how at the time she resented it, feeling absolutely sure at fifteen there was nothing under the sun she could not understand fully.

But the tumble in the river and peril to her life had left her completely stranded, as it were, upon an unknown shore of indecision.  Evidently it was just what Billie had called it, a fool stunt for her to try and row up that river alone.  Kit had always gone rather jauntily on her way doing as she thought best with an unshakable confidence that nothing could happen to her.  Now she suddenly faced life with a new respect for the unexpected.  Snags and sunken trees in the way of intrepid voyagers were evidently facts which one had to guard against.

Another thing, there was a very uncomfortable sensation around Kit’s crown of glory, for her enemy had heaped coals of fire on her head, and returned good for evil in such an overwhelming measure, she never could repay him.  Surely twenty-four hours had made an enormous difference in Kit’s outlook on life, for she considered these things instead of the pink negligee on the foot of the bed.

The afternoon of the third day she was allowed to sit down on the veranda in a large willow armchair.  Helen and Doris hovered over her quite as if she had been the heroine of some romantic adventure, and nearly all the tent colonists visited her in relays.  Billie came up last of all, and brought her a live walking-stick on a spray of sassafras, as a special token, but Stanley did not appear.

“He’s gone off up in the hills,” Billie told her, “chasing some kind of a new moth.  You’d be awfully dead by now, Kit, if he hadn’t happened to see you go down, because I was in the tent and didn’t know anything about it.  But it was just like him to dash after you, and pull you out.  He did that one day in Washington last winter, and saved a little darky from being run down by a fire engine.  I told him he was a regular emergency doctor.  I wish I could be like he is; I mean right on the job when there’s any real danger.”

Kit leaned her chin reflectively on her hand.