Perry glared up at the hidden treasure—the effort of Ralph's hand completely contained it, but as our young man was about to say, "Mayn't I count it down to you?" the wondering eyes shifted, resting at once, Ralph saw, on another object. He heard nothing, and his back was to the door from the hall, which Perry would have seen noiselessly opened and with the effect of an appeal for admission. Ralph watched his face, but waited before turning, waited as if something hung on it, and only advised somehow by what he noted to lower his fist and restore it slowly to his pocket. And then Perry had spoken. "If you've come up for your share, my dear, he vows he's all ready to put it on the table, and you can be served first if you like."
The whole passage, however, was otherwise so soundless that Ralph listened a full minute for the answer to this remark before facing about.
IV
The girl was for the time stillness incarnate; she carried the burden of what she had done very much after the fashion of a glass filled to the brim, held out at arm's length and sure to overflow at the first jostle. What she had been mutely doing as she stood there must have been to beg her brother to refrain from any word that would make her position more awkward, and that she felt some confidence for this might have appeared, the next instant, in her large grave look at his companion, which struck Ralph as a sign of greeting the most intended, and yet at the same time the shyest, ever made him. She might scarce have expected recognition, but she seemed to take him in with so little felt restriction on staring that he measured at once the relief she enjoyed at finding him only with Perry. She had been wound up, he felt, for something more difficult, and now this was blest, was a reprieve, for he was quickly certain that with Perry she could easily deal—all the more that what he had just said to her wasn't the deprecated jog, inasmuch as it didn't at all reflect upon her, but reflected only on their cousin. Ralph had in her presence still a couple more of extraordinarily swift reflections—one of these perhaps the very most immediate, in its sweetness and clearness, that had visited his consciousness of these rich hours and bearing upon the fact exactly that he was her cousin, hers much more for instance than Molly's, in respect to whom the nature of the relative was swallowed up in the nature of the lover; bearing on it so happily that in the course of another moment he had brought out the beautiful sense in his own greeting, which had the effect of reading into hers everything either he or she could have desired. He didn't grin for this, as he had been doing for Perry—he breathed it softly, but ever so gravely: "Cousin, cousin, cousin!" though after it too, with the same gravity, which yet, as he felt even in uttering the words, was a perfect extravagance: "Isn't it great, great?"
"Great that we're cousins—'great'?" It had broken her stillness happily and, as he figured, without the jostle of her arm; for again it not only left her intrusion ideally unchallenged, but instantly gave it such importance of ground as could in no way whatever be taken from it.
"Well, what I call great," he returned in the liveliest promptitude of explanation; well aware, on the second thought, that it was one of the wrong kinds of turns, one of those that had made the rest of the family exchange wonderments, but eager, within the moment, to be able to judge whether it hadn't perhaps even positively pleased her.
"He calls things in such ways as you've never heard," Perry declared to her as for further and possibly still more convenient information; which Ralph, rejoicing at the comparative sociability of it, straightway took up.
"Of course I do, I know it at once as soon as I've done it, know it by the sound after, after, don't you see?"—he addressed the earnest emphasis only to the girl. "Of course we have different expressions—but I'm going to make you like them. I'm going to make you understand them," he explained in the most serious way.
The happiest thing was that though her appearance had determined in him this sudden earnestness, the confidence shown in her and so quickly heaped up made her break into a smile. "I'm not supposed to understand unless I very much want to. Therefore——!" She only smiled, but it gave Ralph an immediate chance.
"Therefore it's clear that you want to so far as I'm concerned; which it's a grand comfort to feel—for I'm not in the least afraid."