"Want me to take a spell with Herbert?"
Monica glanced back at him with a strange look. He loomed weird and tall, with his rather long, red neck and glistening beard and quick blue eyes. A certain sense of power came with him.
"Hello, girls, got back!" he added to the twins, who watched him without speaking.
"Who's there?" said Gran's voice from the other side of the screen. "Is it the girls back? Has Mary come with you?"
As if in answer to the summons, Mary appeared in the doorway, wearing a white apron. She glanced first at Jack, with her black eyes, and then at Gran. Monica was watching her with a sideways lynx look, and Grace was looking at everybody with big blue eyes, while Easu looked down from his uncouth, ostrich height.
"Hello, Gran!" said Mary, going to the other side of the screen to kiss the old lady. The twins followed suit.
"Want me to take a spell in here?" said Easu, jerking his thumb at the sleeping Herbert. Easu wore black trousers hitched up high with braces over a dark-grey flannel shirt, and leather leggings, but no boots. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up from his sinewy brown arms. His reddish fair hair was thick and rather long. He spoke in a deep gruff voice, that he made as quiet as possible, and he seemed to show a gruff sort of submissiveness to Jack, at the moment.
"No, Easu," replied Gran, "I can't do with you, Jack Grant will manage."
The sick man was sleeping through it all like the dead.
"I can take a turn," said Mary's soft, low, insidious voice.