Rob threw back his shoulders complacently. "Daddy says that is why I am so awkward; that my height is too much for a fourteen-year-old boy to manage gracefully. I'll soon be through growing at this rate. Maybe after a couple of years more I'll not have to change the mark on the tree."
"I should certainly hope so," cried Lloyd, "unless you want to be a giant in a side-show. Heah! Measuah me."
She stiffened herself against the trunk of the tree, standing as erect as possible, while he stuck the blade of his knife into the bark, so close to the top of her head that he almost pinned a lock of the light hair to the tree.
"You've grown a lot too, this last year, Lloyd," he said, looking down at her approvingly.
"Oh, Rob," she cried, with a quick, wistful look upward into his face. "I don't want to grow up. It would be so much nicah if we could stay children always."
"We have had a lot of fun under these old locusts, that's a fact," he admitted, as he began cutting the date opposite the measurements he had just taken. Then he became so absorbed in trying to make the figures neatly that he said nothing more until the task was done.
Lloyd, kneeling on the rustic bench to watch him, was silent also, and for a few minutes the only sound in all the late afternoon sunshine was the soft rustling of the leaves overhead.
"If they could only stay children always!" the locusts were repeating one to another. "Children always! That is the happiest time!" Rob, intent on his carving, never noticed the stirring of the leaves, but the Little Colonel, who in a vague way always seemed to understand the whisperings of these old family sentinels, looked up and listened. As if she were one of them, she began recalling with them the scenes they had looked upon. How long ago seemed those summer days when she measured up only to the first notch. Mom Beck and Rob's faithful old nurse, Dinah, sat on the bench where she was now kneeling, and watched the two children that the locusts were whispering about, romping up and down the avenue. How well she remembered the little blue shoes she wore, and the jingling of the bells on the gay knitted bridle, as they played horse, with Fritz barking wildly at their heels.
The locusts had watched them in all the playtimes that lay between the first and last of those seven notches, eight it would be when Rob had finished; for it was in their friendly shade they had rolled their hoops and spun their tops and played at marbles and made their kites. Here, too, they had set their target when he taught her to shoot with his air rifle, and up and down in the winter holidays they had passed with their skates over their shoulders, with their sleds dragging after them, or their arms piled high with Christmas greens. Here they had tramped, shoulder to shoulder, whistling like two boys; here they had raced their ponies; here they had strolled and played and sung together, the strong, deep friendship yearly growing stronger between them, as they yearly cut a higher notch in the bark of the old measuring-tree.
"If they could only stay children always!" whispered the locusts again, with something so like a sigh in the refrain, that Lloyd felt the tears spring to her eyes, she scarcely knew why.