Then Joan went up to Harry’s room in all her self-possessed activity, and laid the clean white shirts carefully into the half-packed portmanteau, which stood like a kind of coffin half open in the deserted room. She looked through all the drawers, and put in everything he was likely to want. She had a very soft heart to her younger brother. There were only some five or six years between them, but a boy of four-and-twenty looks very young to a woman over thirty; she felt as if he might have been her son. Will and Tom were different. She had shared their games and such training as they had, and lived her hoyden days in their close company, with a careless comradeship, but no particular sentiment. Harry, however, had been the one who was away. When he came home at holiday times he was the stranger, the little brother, less robust than the others, a boy who had to be considered and cared for; even his mending and darning, in which she early had a share, had to be more carefully done than the others, for Mrs. Joscelyn had been jealous of any imperfection in her boy’s outfit falling under Uncle Henry’s, or still more Uncle Henry’s housekeeper’s eye. And so it had happened that a very special softness of regard for Harry had come into his elder sister’s mind. Nobody knew of it, but there it was. Perhaps the fact that he had “a deal of mother in him” had added to this partiality, notwithstanding that the mother’s peculiarities had often exasperated Joan in their original manifestation. Reflected in Harry they gave him a certain charm, the charm which a nature full of sudden impulses, swift to act and lively to feel has to a more substantial and matter-of-fact nature. She packed his clothes even with a tender touch, smoothing everything with the greatest neatness, arranging layer above layer in the most perfect order. “They’ll all be tossed into his drawers pell-mell,” she said, shaking her head over the linen as she laid it in, with a smile on her face. She disliked untidiness next to wickedness, but in Harry it was venial. Even Harry’s wrong-doings would have been no more hardly judged by Joan than with a shake of the head and a smile.
When she had finished her packing, she went downstairs on a still more congenial errand, and packed a hamper of home produce for her brother.