“Are you sure it’s so different?”
They were at the gate, turning in to the long avenue of box elders, and she caught at the first little commonplace thing to say, with,
“Look at our trees, Pearse. Aren’t they lovely? Haven’t they grown a lot since the last time you saw them? Right over there is the spring at the head of the asequia where you came in that day. You can’t quite see it from here for the mound—Burch used to call it the little mountain when he was a baby—that mound’s over the cyclone cellar.”
There wasn’t another word said till Pearse was lifting her down at the steps, and Aunt Val rose from a rocker on the porch to meet them. Miss Van Brunt seemed to like at once this tall, good looking young fellow who had known her brother and her brother’s wife and children. She felt that such a person had background, and background was the thing she was apt to miss in her western acquaintances. Burch came out and said “Hello,” amusingly certain that he perfectly remembered Pearse, and took the visitor up to the room which had been prepared for him. When they came downstairs again, Hilda was waiting for them.
“I’m going to show Pearse over the place a bit while it’s still light enough to see things,” she said easily, then in a half-whisper, “Quick, Pearse. Come this way. Around the house. We’ll have to go in by the back. Nobody knows about my cyclone cellar yet.”
They ran, hand in hand, like two children, ducking under the low-swung branches of trees, skirting shrubs. When they burst into the kitchen, old Sam Kee, straightening up from the range where he was sliding a pan of biscuits into the oven, looked at them with such twinkling eyes that Hilda was sure he had already watched Pearse’s arrival.
“You know who this is, don’t you, Sam?” she smiled.
“Sure, I know,” the Chinaman grinned back at her. “Plitty nice boy you got. Fine young man, now.”
“That was good coffee and chow you gave me,” Pearse offered diplomatically.
“This dinner-time more good chow.” Sam Kee’s yellow face was a pucker of amiability. “You stay here, I feed you all time good chow.”