“He looks at me,” she burst out distressedly on one such day. “Don’t let him look at me.”
Tom gave a start and turned round, and Mr. Stamps gave a start also, at once mildly recovering himself.
“Leave her alone,” said Tom, “what are you lookin’ at her for?”
Mr. Stamps smiled.
“Thar’s no law agin it, Tom,” he replied. “An’ she’s wuth a lookin’ at. She’s that kind, an’ it’ll grow on her. Ten year from now thar ain’t no law es ’ed keep ’em from lookin’ at her, ’thout it was made an’ passed in Congrist. She’ll hev to git reckonciled to a-bein’ looked at.”
“Leave her alone,” repeated Tom, quite fiercely. “I’ll not have her troubled.”
“I didn’t go to trouble her, Tom,” said Mr. Stamps, softly; and he slipped down from the counter and sidled out of the store and went home.
With Mr. Stamps Sheba always connected her first knowledge of the fact that her protector’s temper could be disturbed. She had never seen him angry until she saw Mr. Stamps rouse him to wrath on the eventful fifth birthday, from which the first exciting events of her life dated themselves. Up to that time she had seen only in his great strength and broad build a power to protect and shield her own fragility and smallness from harm or fear. When he took her in his huge arms and held her at what seemed to be an incredible height from the ordinary platform of existence, she had only felt the cautious tenderness of his touch and recognised her own safety, and it had never occurred to her that his tremendous voice, which was so strong and deep by nature, that it might have been a terrible one if he had chosen to make it so, could express any other feeling than kindliness in its cheery roar.
But on this fifth birthday Tom presented himself to her childish mind in a new light.
She had awakened early to find him standing at her small bedside and a new doll lying in her arms. It was a bigger doll than she had ever owned before, and so gaily dressed, that in her first rapture her breath quite forsook her. When she recovered it, she scrambled up, holding her new possession in one arm and clung with the other around Tom’s neck.