Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/192

 it in silence, she concluded that the interview was at an end, and started up the path.

"You'd better not—" he began, but stopped suddenly and appeared to reconsider. "Oh, I don't know," he added, "it might be better, after all. Go along."

The trail was little more than a worn line in the grass, now; soon it turned sharply to the left, skirted the wood, and led to a tiny, dilapidated cottage. Caroline had more than once passed it by under the impression that it was abandoned, or used perhaps for storing ice or wood; but to-day a thin curl of smoke stained the blue above it and through the open door of the one living-room that formed its ground-floor she saw a scarlet Navajo blanket, on which reposed a magnificent snowy Angora cat. A great green bough covered one of the walls, and a few chairs, a square pine table and a guitar flung against a pile of bright cushions, completed the furniture. At the further end of the room, stretched upon the mate to the Angora's blanket, lay a young woman, sobbing violently.

Caroline hesitated, but Henry D. Thoreau