Sometimes the shrill little voice, with its unceasing questions, seemed to annoy the old farmer as he dozed over his weekly newspaper beside the lamp. Then, if it was too early to go to bed, Steven would coax him over in a corner to look at the book that Mrs. Estel had given him, explaining each picture in a low voice that could not disturb the deaf old couple.
It was at these times that the old feeling of loneliness came back so overwhelmingly. Grandpa and Grandma, as they called them, were kind in their way, but even to their own children they had been undemonstrative and cold. Often in the evenings they seemed to draw so entirely within themselves, she with her knitting and he with his paper or accounts, that Steven felt shut out, and apart. "Just the strangers within thy gates," he sometimes thought to himself. He had heard that expression a long time ago, and it often came back to him. Then he would put his arm around Robin and hug him up close, feeling that the world was so big and lonesome, and that he had no one else to care for but him.
Sometimes he took him up early to the little room under the roof, and, lying on the side of the bed, made up more marvellous stories than any the book contained.
Often they drew the big wooden rocking-chair close to the window, and, sitting with their arms around each other, looked out on the moonlit stillness of the summer night. Then, with their eyes turned starward, they talked of the far country beyond; for Steven tried to keep undimmed in Robin's baby memory a living picture of the father and mother he was so soon forgetting.
"Don't you remember," he would say, "how papa used to come home in the evening and take us both on his knees, and sing 'Kingdom Coming' to us? And how mamma laughed and called him a big boy when he got down on the floor and played circus with us?
"And don't you remember how we helped mamma make cherry pie for dinner one day? You were on the doorstep with some dough in your hands, and a greedy old hen came up and gobbled it right out of your fingers."
Robin would laugh out gleefully at each fresh reminiscence, and then say: "Tell some more r'members, Big Brother!" And so Big Brother would go on until a curly head drooped over on his shoulder and a sleepy voice yawned "Sand-man's a-comin'."
The hands that undressed him were as patient and deft as a woman's. He missed no care or tenderness.
When he knelt down in his white gown, just where the patch of moonlight lay on the floor, his chubby hands crossed on Big Brother's knee, there was a gentle touch of caressing fingers on his curls as his sleepy voice repeated the evening prayer the far away mother had taught them.
There was always one ceremony that had to be faithfully performed, no matter how sleepy he might be. The black dancing bear had always to be put to bed in a cracker box and covered with a piece of red flannel.