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trotted off. “That’s all for today, Sky. But I’ll be back.”
     

Chapter Three
     
    Caitlin Burke looked up from her copy of Jane Eyre and over at the calendar that stood on her desk. Only three weeks and she would be home in New Mexico. She looked out the window at the rolling green lawn of the Fayreweather Academy, which was shaded by oak and elm trees. She closed her eyes and tried to summon a picture of the landscape she’d grown up in. Sagebrush, not grass, covered their land. Stunted junipers twisted by the wind. Pinon pines. The only oak trees were gambel oaks and they looked more like bushes. And everything growing out of red dust, not rich black earth.
    She had hated leaving it all a year and a half ago. She had thought she’d die of homesickness, not just for her parents but for the land itself. It was six months before she had stopped crying herself to sleep each night. But gradually she had gotten used to it, even come to love the differences. She had made friends. She had discovered literature and writing. And she had met Henry. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted to go home.
    No, that wasn’t true, she thought, as she marked her place and closed the book. Of course she was dying to see Ma and Da and to share with them all that had happened to her in the last six months. She had to admit she was also dying for a good ride, not sitting primly and properly on a sidesaddle, but astride on one of their horses. And there was Heathcliff waiting for her.
    She smiled as she remembered her first sight of the little black colt. He’d been born in the early hours of the morning and her da had promised she could see the new baby right after breakfast. Ma and Da exchanged looks over their coffee, but she was so excited that she’d hardly noticed it.
    They all went together, but as they stood there, the colt came to her on his wobbly legs and gazed into her eyes as though he already knew her. She’d fallen in love at that moment. “It’s like he knows me already, Da,” she had whispered.
    “ ‘Tis a good thing he does, since he’ll be yours, Cait. Happy birthday, though ‘tis two months since ye turned sixteen.”
    “Oh, Da, do you mean it?”
    “It’s why you only got a book, Cait,” said Elizabeth.
    “Wuthering Heights was a wonderful present, Ma.” She was quiet for a minute and then said, “I think I’ll call him Heathcliff.” It seemed right, for she had fallen in love with the colt instantly, just as Cathy had. And her name was close enough to Cathy, too.
    “Heathcliff, is it? I was thinking that he’s going to be one of those rare colts with white sprinkled all over him, like the night sky. But he’s your horse, Cait,” Michael added, his voice strained.
    Elizabeth jabbed her husband in the ribs. “Well, sure, ‘tis a romantic name,” he continued lamely.
    Caitlin had to smile herself, two years later. She had been such a romantic sixteen-year-old, identifying with the wild Cathy, imagining the desert landscape to be the moors of Yorkshire as she rode it. Well, the wind was certainly as wild, if a lot hotter and drier. She was much more sophisticated now, not that ‘green girl from the Wild West’ or ‘Calico Cait’ as her classmates used to call her. She didn’t even like Cathy much anymore. She had been foolish and faithless and stupid to marry Lynton. Jane Eyre had more integrity and certainly as much passion, though she kept it banked, like a good fire.
    And Jane had had a favorite teacher, just like she had. Even in the worst of her homesickness, Caitlin had responded to Mrs. Weld. She was the youngest of the teachers, although a widow, and she was able to understand and empathize with the romantic longings of an adolescent girl. It was she who had pointed out the lack of a real heroine in Wuthering Heights when they began studying the English novel. Caitlin hadn’t thought much about heroines before. They had a very small collection of books at home, which had grown very