Anna's evil spirit was in the ascendant that afternoon,
steeling her heart against Lucy's doleful exclamations, as one after
another her delicate slippers were torn, and the sharp thistles, of
which the path was full, penetrated to her soft flesh. Straight and
unbending as a young Indian, Anna walked on, shutting her ears against
the sighs of weariness which reached them from time to time. But when
there came a half sobbing cry of actual pain, she stopped suddenly and
turned towards Lucy, whose breath came gaspingly, and whose cheeks
were almost purple with the exertion she had made.
"I cannot go any farther until I rest," she said, sinking down,
exhausted, upon a large flat rock beneath a walnut tree.
Touched with pity at the sight of the heated face, from which the
sweat was dripping, Anna too sat down beside her, and, laying her
curly head in her lap, smoothed the golden hair, hating herself
cordially, as Lucy said:
"You've walked so fast I could not keep up. You do not know, perhaps,
how weak I am, and how little it takes to tire me. They say my heart
is diseased, and an unusual excitement might kill me."
"No, oh, no!" Anna answered with a shudder, as she thought of what
might have been the result of her rashness, and then she smoothed the
wet hair, which, dried by the warm sunbeams, coiled itself up in
golden masses, which her fingers softly threaded.
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