‘I’ve not changed you,’ she laughed. ‘I only found you out. The day you came I saw you were simply full of our things—and that you’d be a sort of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon as ever you can write them out——’
She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the voice of Mlle. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through the open French window—a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.
‘A beginning, at any rate!’ he said to himself, thinking of all the things he was going to write for them. ‘Only I wish we were all in camp out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you mayn’t cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted....’
The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled; laughing and sighing as he went. ‘My wig!’ he thought aloud, ‘but it’s really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things I could never have dreamed of—alone!’
‘Paul, dear, what are you thinking about, here all by yourself—and without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud like this they will think—! Well, I hardly know quite what they will think!’
‘Something Blake said—to be honest,’ he laughed, turning to his sister who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow upon her face.
‘Maurice Blake!’ she exclaimed. ‘Joan’s cousin with the big farm on the Downs? But you don’t know him!’
‘Not that Blake,’ he laughed again; ‘and Joan, if you mean Joan Nicholson, Dick’s niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in London, I have never seen in my life.’
‘Then it’s a book you mean—one of those books you are always poring over in the library,’ she murmured half reproachfully.
‘One of Dick’s books, yes,’ he replied gently, linking his arm through hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. ‘One of my “treasures,”’ he added slyly, ‘that you once shamelessly imagined to be in petticoats.’