NN LIVINGSTONE sat swaying back and forth in her green cane rocker on her front porch. About her was such strength of green light of tree-boughs, ruffling in a southwest wind, that even the folds of her black-silk skirt showed faint reflexes of that color. Her smooth, blond hair had a greenish cast. It was, of all her fair, slender, middle-aged figure, as if it were seen through depths of levels of green water, like a mermaid's. It may be that people, like landscapes, have their color-schemes. Ann had always loved the soothing background color of the earth-green. She had surrounded herself with it. Her home was vine-screened and surrounded by trees and hedges. In her youth she had worn green gowns; now she wore black, and left the green to her daughter Ruth, who had inherited her mother's love of the color.
The porch was sweet with blooming roses and elder-flowers, and other indefinite odors, blending in a bouquet of perfume. Presently there cut through it a pungent odor of tobacco. Ann glanced over her shoulder and saw her brother Stephen's face framed in a window. It was a large, handsome, elderly face, white-bearded and keen-eyed.
“Has Ruth come?” the man asked.
“No. I am waiting for her. You know she stayed at Jim Gordon's mother's longer than she expected. Charlotte Gordon was perfectly sweet when Jim became engaged to Ruth; she insisted that he should use the setting of her own engagement-ring for the one he gave Ruth, and it was too small and had to be enlarged.”
“What became of the stone in Jim's mother's own ring?”
“She must have lost it, I suppose. Anyway, the setting is hand-wrought Indian gold and very beautiful.”
“What is the stone?”
“Oh, an emerald, of course. Ruth is as much a crank over green as her old mother. Here she comes now. She will be so delighted to see you.”
The man lounged out as a car rolled up, and a girl sprang out. She was fair, like her mother, very pretty, and clad in pale green like a fairy. She fluttered lightly up the steps, kissed her mother, and made round blue eyes of interrogation at the man.
“Your uncle Stephen, dearest,” said Ann. “He has left the West for good, and is going to stay here with us.”
The girl made a dart at the man. She flung her arms around his neck. She was curiously childlike in her ways. Her voice even struck unexpectedly sudden high, sweet cadences, like a child's.
“I am so glad you have come, Uncle Stephen!” said she.
Ruth's hair was of a light, feathery quality, fluffed about her small face. She stood looking at her uncle smilingly, and teetered a little on her toes, with an effect of dancing.
“Does she look like me, Stephen?” asked Ann.
“She looks like herself, and nobody else on earth, unless it is a queer kind of humming-bird,” said Stephen.
He held the girl off and shook her slender shoulders and regarded her with tenderness, this little, slight beauty of a girl, who looked at him with the questioning eyes of a child, ready to be loved, ready to shrink if flouted. Suddenly a serious expression came over her face.
“You know about Jim?” she asked. “Mother has told you?”
“She has told me you were going to leave just as I got where I could see a little of you and your mother after all these years,” said Stephen. He looked rather grave. His own romance of life had failed.
“Jim and I are always to spend our summers here,” said Ruth; “and if you stay with mother, everything will be just complete. All that troubled me was leaving mother, winters. Of course she will stay a great deal in the city with Jim and me. And now you can come, too, Uncle Stephen. I am not going to leave.”
“Girls like you are born to leave,” said Stephen, laughing. “What are wings for?”
Ruth, starting quickly, stood away and gazed intently at her left hand.
“What is the matter, Ruth?” asked her mother.
“My ring doesn't shine as much as I thought it did,” Ruth answered.
“It is only because it is so dark in here. You must remember this porch is always twilight with the vines.”
“I suppose that is it. But it startled me all of a sudden. It had always blazed up in my eyes like a green dew-drop, and then it did not.”
“Nonsense,” said Ann. “You forget that no jewel except a diamond will show much light in a gloomy place.”
“And not all diamonds,” said Stephen. His shrewd eyes looked shrewder. “May I see your ring now, Ruth?” he asked.
Ruth extended her hand simply. She looked at him for admiration. Stephen bent over the little hand, on which was the ring with the large green stone. He gave a hardly perceptible start.
“Isn't it a beauty, Uncle Stephen?”
“Do you object to taking the ring off, dear?” asked Stephen.