Stephen and Hugh, in their different boyish ways, loved the girl-child, and wooed her.
She tolerated them both, patronized, tyrannized, and cared little for either.
Hugh was thick-set and had sweaty hands. Often he bored her.
Stephen’s odd face, already at fourteen corrugated by thought, ambition and strident personality painfully concealed, repelled her—even frightened her a little, a very little; for her cherished life and serene soul gave her little gift of fear.
Their wills clashed daily—but almost always over things about which she cared little or less than little, and did not trouble to be insistent. She yielded over such trifles—out of indifference and almost contemptuous good-nature sheerly. And the boy, “blind” here at least, misread it. But on one point Stephen never could prevail against her. She would neither renounce her invisible playmates nor even concede him that they were indeed “make-believe.”
Her will and Hugh’s never clashed. How could they? He had no will but hers.
Stephen, loving her as strongly and as hotly, sought to be her master. No conscious presumption this: it was his nature.
Deep Dale was all simmering blue and green to-day—with softening shadows and tones of gray; blue sky, green grass, trees green-leafed, gray-trunked—green paths, gray and green-walled, blue roofed, the early spring flowers (growing among the grasses but sparsely as yet, and being woven, too often broken-necked, into Hugh’s devoted jewelering) too tiny of modest bud and timid bloom to speck but most minutely the picture with lemon, violet or rose. The little girl’s wealth of red hair made the glory and the only emphatic color of the picture. Hugh’s hair was ash brown and dull—Stephen’s darker, growing to black—but as dull. Even the clothes of these three children painted in perfectly with the blue and green of this early May-day, Nature’s spring-song. The lads, not long out of mourning, were dressed in sober gray. Helen’s frocks came from Hanover Square, when they did not come from the _Rue de Rivoli_, and to-day her little frock of turquoise cashmere was embroidered and sashed with green as soft and tender as the pussy willows and their new baby leafage.
But the sun—a pale gray sun at best all day—was slipping down the sky’s blue skirt. Helen, tiring of her elvish play, or wholesomely hungry for “cambric” tea and buns, slid off the tree trunk, smiled back and waved her hand—to nothing, and turned towards the house. Hugh trotted after her, not sorry to suspend his trying toil, not sorry to approach cake and jam, but carrying his stickily woven tribute with him. But Stephen, enthralled, almost entranced, lay still, his fine chin cupped in his strong hand, his eyes—and his soul—watching a flock of birds flying nestward towards the night.