The worst of it was the root of bitterness in her heart.  She could never forgive Mrs. Whittredge.  Few guessed the intensity hidden beneath Celia’s gentle manner.  Only now and then a spark from her dark blue eyes revealed it.  The general construction put upon her proud reserve was that she was unsociable.

There is no loneliness like that of the unforgiving heart.  Celia had never felt it so strongly as after her meeting with Rosalind Whittredge in the cemetery.  There had been something in the soft gaze of the gray eyes that she could not forget.  It had made her take up the rose again after she flung it away and carry it home with her.

But she must not linger here any longer.  There was an order from the Exchange in the city which should be promptly filled if she hoped for others.  As she rose she confronted Morgan entering the gate.

“Good morning,” he said, and there was an odd sort of embarrassment in his manner as he added, “Some of your window frames need fixing, Miss Celia.”

She smiled and shook her head.  “Can’t afford it.”

“Miss Celia, let me do it, I’ve lots of time, and the doctor was very good to me,” he said.

Again Celia shook her head, but the hurt look on Morgan’s face made her relent.  “Well, perhaps the worst ones,” she spelled.  She would trust to being able to make it up to him sometime.

“That’s right,” he exclaimed, joyfully, adding, as he turned to go, “Don’t you worry, Miss Celia.  There’s good in it somewhere.”

CHAPTER ELEVENTH.

Making friends.

“Is not that neighborly?”

Miss Betty’s tea party was the beginning of a new and happier state of affairs for Rosalind; one pleasant thing followed another.  There were letters from the travellers, long and delightful and full of the genial spirit of the Forest, making her more than ever certain that they and she were alike journeying beneath its shelter, and at some turn of the road would surely meet again.

Mrs. Whittredge also had a letter, “I trust you will not keep Rosalind secluded,” her son wrote.  “I want her to have companions of her own age, and to learn to know and love the old town as I loved it.  She has lived too much with Louis and me and story books; it is time she was waking up.”

This explains why the Roberts children and the Partons received special invitations to call on Rosalind.  Friendship began to seem to her a very different place as her acquaintance with it grew and neighborly relations were established with Maurice and Katherine.  The gap in the hedge became a daily meeting-place, and grew slowly, but steadily, wider.

A few days after the tea party, Katherine asked Rosalind to go out to the creek with her, and on the way they stopped for Belle.  While she went to find her hat, Rosalind made the acquaintance of the colonel and several dogs.  Then the three strolled along the wide street, under the shade of tall maples, past pleasant gardens and inviting houses, until the street turned into a country road, and before them was Red Hill and the little bridge over Friendly Creek at its foot.