It was the way in which the boy had said “just anybody.” Peter gazed beyond the gate into the green mysterious depth of country—an Eden from which he was excluded by that hostile back. His eyes followed Friday Lane: it ran on, trees, sunshine and shadows, tremulous with the wings of birds, a canopied track, across fields, into the heart of wooded fairyland. What promises lay over there? A voice of ecstasy kept calling.
Reluctantly he set his feet against the pedals, glanced across his shoulder to Kay and was going to have said—
Something that glistened shot down her cheek and swiftly vanished.
Very deliberately he dismounted. Yankee-Doodle, or a tune not unlike it, was being played at the moment. He thumped the student of the mouth-organ in the place from which Eve was created. Kay, all legs, flushed face and blown hair, watched from the back seat of the trike the novel sight of her brother being violent.
The boy tumbled from his perch, putting the gate between himself and Peter. Yankee-Doodle ended abruptly—the mouth-organ slipped from his hand. The freckled good humor of his face changed to an expression of amused and fierce intelligence. It was his way to be amused when he was angry or in danger—Kay and Peter were to learn that later. He bobbed in the grass, recovered his fallen treasure, rubbed it on his sleeve, stuffed it into his knickerbockers’ pocket and grimaced across the rail.
“You’re a fresh kid.”
Peter removed his cap; his curly hair fell about his forehead. “You’ve made my sister cry,” he said. His hands were clenched.
One leg hopped over the gate; then another. “I haven’t,” the boy denied stoutly.
“You have. You called her ‘just anybody.’”
The boy stepped into the road—a pugnacious little figure. “Pshaw! What of it? Girls cry for nothing.”