A shouting babble of voices rose in the distance. The children crying to each other came out of the house-door and raced down the flag-stone walk. "There they are! In the garden! By the onion-bed! Father! Mother! We've been looking for you everywhere. Touclé says if you'll let her, she'll boil down some maple syrup for us to wax on ice for dessert."
They poured into the garden, children, cat and fox-terrier, noisy, insistent, clamorous. Mark, always frankly greedy of his mother's attention, pushed in jealously between his parents, clinging to his mother's knees. He looked up in her face and laughed out, his merry peal, "Oh, Mother, what a dirty face! You've been suspiring and then you've wiped your forehead with your dirty hand, the way you say I mustn't. How funny you look! And you've got a great, long tear in your sleeve, too."
Behind them, tiny, smooth and glistening, Eugenia Mills strolled to the edge of the garden, as far as the flag-stones went, and stood waiting, palpably incapable of taking her delicate bronze slippers into the dust.
"You've missed a kitchen call from that lively, earthy old Mrs. Powers and her handsome daughter-in-law," she announced casually. "Touclé says they brought some eggs. What a stunning creature that Nelly is! There's temperament for you! Can't you just feel the smouldering, primitive fire hidden under that scornful silence of hers?"
"Mother, may we tell Touclé to put the syrup on to boil?" begged Elly. Her hair was tangled and tousled, with bits of bark sticking in it, and dried mud was caked on her hands and bare legs. Marise thought of the repugnance she must have aroused in Eugenia.
"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles is going to give me a fishing-rod, he says. A real one. Boughten."
"Oh, I want one too!" cried Mark, jumping up and down. "I want one too."
"You're too little. Mother, isn't Mark too little? And anyhow, he always breaks everything. You do, Mark, you know you do. I take care of my things!"