In the little room upstairs, where less than an hour before she had dressed in happy excitement, Kate tore off the paper flowers and wild rose pods. She threw them in a heap on the floor--the cherished mitts, the bunting dress--while she sobbed in a child's abandonment, with the tears running unchecked down her cheeks. The music floating up the stairway and through the transom, the scuffling sound of sliding feet, added to her grief. She had wanted, oh, how she had wanted to dance!
The thought that Hughie had suffered humiliation because of her was little short of torture. But he had not deserted her--he had stuck--even in her misery she gloried in that--and how handsome he had looked! Why, there was not a man in the room that could compare with him! His clothes, the way he had borne himself, the something different about him which she could not analyze. It was a woman's pride that shone in her swollen red-lidded eyes as she told herself this, while she pinned on her shabby Stetson in trembling haste, buckled the spurs on her boots and snatched up her ugly mackinaw.
Hugh was waiting for her in the office below.
The horses were tied to the hitching rack. Kate gulped down the lump that rose in her throat as she swung into the saddle. The orchestra was playing the "Blue Danube," and she especially loved that waltz. The strains followed them up the street, and tears she could not keep back fell on the horse's mane as she drooped a little over the saddlehorn.
She looked down through dimmed eyes upon the lights streaming from the windows of the Prouty House, as they climbed the steep pitch to the bench above town, and the alluring brightness increased the aching heaviness of her heart, for she felt that she was leaving all they represented behind her forever. She knew she never could find the courage to risk going through such an ordeal again.
A childhood without playmates had created a longing for companionship that was pathetic in its eagerness, and the yearning had not been modified by the isolation and monotony of her present life. To dance, to be merry, to have the opportunity to please, seemed the most important thing in the world to the girl and now she seemed to realize, in mutinous despair, that through no fault of her own she was going to be cheated of that which was her right--of that which was every girl's right--to have the pleasures which belonged to her years.
Kate's standards were the standards of the old west and of the mountains and plains, which take only personal worth into account, so she did not yet comprehend clearly what it was all about. She herself had done nothing to merit such treatment from people whose names she did not even know. She rode for a long time without speaking, trying, in her tragic bewilderment, to puzzle it out.