The girl watched the gathering twilight and deliberately let the time pass without attempting to return to the house until compelled to do so by real darkness, realizing that some beneficial thing was happening in her in this free out-of-doors place, for she was less annoyed and more analytical with each breath she drew in it. "If only I'd take time to do this sort of thing I'd be more as I ought to be," she meditated when she had at last risen to go home. "I won't be like pa! I won't! I won't!" she reiterated many times as she walked back, over the frozen cow-path. "I'll come here every few days. Ma and pa were born to be happy, only they never took time to be." And though John was cross because the baby had cried in her absence, Elizabeth felt that she had been helped by getting away from him. She accepted her husband's reproaches without reply, and was able to forget them even while they were still issuing from his mouth. She kept her temper down all that week, and though the Thanksgiving invitations were not sent, she cooked the dinner and put as many hours into its concoction as if she had had all the people she had hoped to have about her board to eat it, and she was so sunny and natural as she served it that John did not even guess that she was governing herself consciously. She stayed at home the next Sunday and the next, and John Hunter was unaware that she was endeavouring to surrender herself to his will. "She'll get over wanting to run somewhere all the time," he told his mother, and Mrs. Hunter, to whom these people were not pleasing, agreed with him, and thought that it was just as well if it were so, not realizing that the girl lived alone in their house and that she might have an attitude toward these people distinctly different from theirs. This winter, like the preceding one, passed with Elizabeth at home. There was no peace to be had if she thought of going anywhere for any purpose whatever. Elizabeth went nowhere and required few clothes. The cold the child had caught on that first trip to Luther's was sufficient excuse to prevent any further foolishness on the part of its mother. However, a trip to town was in waiting for Elizabeth Hunter and was proposed by John Hunter himself.