But hadn't she felt something else in her pocket just now? Conscience pricked when she saw Elizabeth Royce's handwriting. The seal had not been broken, though the letter had come yesterday. She remembered now. They were putting up corn and she had tucked it into her pocket for later reading and then had forgotten it completely. Luckily, Bess need never know that. But what would Bess have said to see her friend Elliott, corn to the right of her, corn to the left of her, cobs piled high in the summer kitchen?
Bess's staccato sentences furnished a sufficiently emphatic clue. "You poor, abused dear! Whenever are you coming home? If I had an aëroplane I'd fly up and carry you off. You must be nearly _crazy_! Those letters you wrote were the most TRAGIC things! I shouldn't have been a bit surprised any time to hear you were sick. _Are_ you sick? Perhaps that's why you don't write or come home. Wire me _the minute you get this_. Oh, Elliott darling, when I think of you marooned in that awful place--"
There was more of it. As Elliott read, she did a strange thing. She began to laugh. But even while she laughed she blushed, too. _Had_ she sounded as desperate as all that? How far away such tragedies seemed now! Suppose she should write, "Dear Bess, I like it up here and I am going to stay my year out." Bess would think her crazy; so would all the girls, and Aunt Margaret, too.
And then suddenly an arresting idea came into her head. What difference would it make if they did think her crazy? Elliott Cameron had never had such an idea before; all her life she had in a perfectly nice way thought a great deal about what people thought of her. This idea was so strange it set her gasping. "But how they would _talk_ about me!" she said. And then her brain clicked back, exactly like another person speaking, "What if they did? That wouldn't really make you crazy, would it?" "Why, no, I suppose it wouldn't," she thought. "And most likely they'd be all talked out by the time I got back, too. But even if they weren't, any one would be crazy to think it was crazy to want to stay up here at Uncle Bob's and Aunt Jessica's. Even Stannard has stayed weeks longer than he needed to!"
When she thought of that she opened her eyes wide for a minute. "Oho!" she said to herself; "I guess Stan did get a rise out of me! You were easy game that time, Elliott Cameron."