She was so busy watching her own feet that she didn’t notice Betty and Jack as they flashed by until they shouted their congratulations on her success.  Then Bert and Dorothy came along and stopped to tell her that they would all meet at the bonfire in fifteen minutes, and go from there to Katharine’s house.  They tried to persuade her to skate around the pond with them, but she was so in love with her own efforts that she said no and sent them off in a hurry.  Then she tried again with new courage, and struck out with such energy that before she knew it she had left the edge of the pond, and was skating with quick and fairly steady strokes in the direction, opposite to that in which Bert and Dorothy had gone.  It startled her when she realized that she had left the meeting-place far behind, and she knew she ought to turn about and try to get back there.  But she was so fascinated by her own success that she hated to turn for fear the spell would be broken.

Suddenly she caught the toe of her skate in a crack, made a frantic effort to keep herself from falling, and then went with a crash flat on her face on the ice.  It seemed an age to her before she could move; then she tried to get up, and some one, rather unskilfully, helped her to her feet.  As she stood there half dazed and shaking, she put her hand to her face and brought it away all wet.

“Oh, dear, my nose is bleeding,” she said aloud, and then became conscious that she had an audience of two small boys, who were grinning at her unsympathetically.

“Won’t you please take off my skates?” she said as pleasantly as she could, for it made her very angry to see them laughing at her.  She longed to get out of their sight as quickly as possible, and she wondered if she could ever make her way across the ice and back to the meeting-place with her knees trembling under her in such unwonted fashion.  Then she thought of how she must look with her face streaked with blood, and she decided it would be better to go home.  She felt quite sure that if she went a little way across the field to the left she should find the road they had come down earlier in the evening.

“It didn’t take us so very long to come down here,” she thought, as she plunged through the snow, “and after I’ve repaired damages Uncle Henry will see that I get back to the party.”

Her nose was still bleeding, but she stopped it after a while with applications of snow.  Her head ached, and she felt sure the afflicted nose was swelling and that she should be a fright.  She wished that she hadn’t tried to be so smart, that she had stayed in the little inlet, and all the useless wishes that one makes when it is too late.

When she came to the road she felt better, and walked along as cheerfully as her increasing aches would permit.  Now that she was getting farther away from the pond it was very still, painfully still, she thought.  The moon had disappeared, but the sky was thickly sown with stars and the glistening snow-mantle was more beautiful than ever.  For some reason the road seemed strangely unfamiliar, and Ruth faltered and almost turned back as she remembered that she had never before been out alone in the evening.  It had been so light at the pond, with the many bonfires, and so noisily gay that she had not realized until now what the loneliness of the walk would be.