She saw that he was looking at her flower garlands, and she broke into a shy little laugh.
“You see what you have done to me, Uncle Tom,” she said; “now you have told me I am a beautiful young woman, I shall always be doing things to—to make myself look prettier.”
She came on to the verandah to him, and he held out his hand to her.
“That’s the spring, too, Sheba,” he said.
She yielded as happily and naturally to the enfolding of his big arm in these days as she had done when she was a baby. No one but themselves knew what they were to each other.
They had always talked things over together—their affection, their pleasures, their simple anxieties and responsibilities. They had discussed her playthings in the first years of their friendship and her lessons when she had been a little girl. To-night the subject which began to occupy them had some seriousness of aspect. The changes time and the tide of war had made were bringing Tom face to face with a difficulty his hopeful, easy-going nature had never contemplated with any realising sense—the want of money, even the moderate amount the requirements of their simple lives made necessary.
“It’s the taxes that a man can’t stand up against,” Tom said. “You may cut off all you like, and wear your old clothes, but there’s a liveliness about taxes that takes the sand out of you. Talk about the green bay-tree flourishing and increasing, all a tax wants is to be let alone a few years. It’ll come to its full growth without any sunning or watering. Mine have had to be left alone for a while, and—well, here we are—another year, and——”
“Will the house be taken?” Sheba asked.
“If I can’t pay up, it’ll all go—house and store and all,” Tom answered. “Then we shall have to go too.”
He turned and looked ruefully at the face beneath the wreath of white narcissus.