“Find me!” she laughed, tiptoeing on her bare feet with her hands clasped behind her head. “Oh, you’ll find me,” she nodded.
“But promise.”
She half-closed her eyes, as though tired by his urgency. Then she threw her hands to her side. “I like you, Peter. I promise.”
Picking up her shoes and stockings she pushed back the bushes. “You’re not to follow.”
He listened. Was she standing there, hidden by the screen of leaves? He had not heard the rustle of her going. Suddenly the branches were thrust back, and again he saw her. Her eyes were alight with merriment and her mouth was puckered. “Oh, little Peter, if you’d only been older——”
Like a secret door in a green wall closing, the branches swished back. The wood muttered to itself as she went from him, and then fell so silent that it seemed to stand with its finger pressed against its mouth.
CHAPTER XXVIII—WAKING UP
The world is a mirror into which we gaze and see the reflection of ourselves. So far to Peter it had been a foreground of small boys and their sisters, with a background of occasional adult relatives. But now, like a fledgling which has grown to strength lying snugly in its nest, he had looked out and seen the leafy distance below him. His curiosity was roused; the commonplace was a wonderland. What went on down there? Where did the parent birds go, and how did they find their way back? What was the meaning of this sun-and-shadow landscape that people called “living”? Because he was young, when he looked out of the nest, the distance below him seemed full of youngness. All that had happened up to now, the collapse of Aunt Jehane’s fortunes, the imprisonment of Uncle Waffles, his father’s problems and the marriage of Grace to her policeman, were mere stories which he had heard reported. There was a battle called life, going on somewhere, in which he had never participated. He was tired of being told about it. He wanted to feel the rush of wind under his outspread wings; this afternoon, in a gust of vivid and personal experience, he thought he had felt it. What was it? By what name should he call it? Because he was only fifteen, love sounded too large a word. And yet——- If it wasn’t love, what was it?