The library had shelves along one wall reaching from the floor well up toward the ceiling in the old Southern way. Filling the shelves at one end were the older books of the house, showing the good but narrow taste of a Southern household in former times. Midway, the modern books were massed, ranging through part of the world's classic literature and through no little of the world's new science; and so marking a transition in culture to the present master and mistress. At the other end of the shelves there was a children's corner of the world's best fairy tales, some English, some German, some Scandinavian—most of them written for little people where winters are long and snows deep and pine forests boundless.
She went to the shelf where the day before she had observed her mother put a book back into its place: the book was there, but no key. So she passed along the shelves back toward the window, where she maintained her lookout; and she trailed her finger-tips along the backs of the books as she passed the children's corner of fairy tales: it was a habit of hers to caress things she was fond of as long as they remained within reach. Once her hand almost touched the key where it lay hidden—among those old-time Christmas stories.
Half glad that her search had been in vain, she returned to her vigil at the window.
"Did you find the key?"
"No; and I'm not sorry I didn't." And then she suddenly cried: "They are coming, Harold! I see them away off on the hilltop yonder, running and jumping."
The boy sat up on the edge of the sofa. He had on a suit of cassimere of a kind of blue-limestone gray as though the rock of the land had been used as a dye; and the brass buttons of his jacket marked him as a member of some military institute, which had released him for the holidays. He laid aside his Book of the World's Great Battles, and put the hair out of his eyes. They had the bold keenness of a hawk's; and his profile was as sharply cut as though it had been chipped along the edge of a white flint.
Any historian of the main stock of our early American people would have fixed curious eyes on him. Merely to behold him was to think backward across oceans and ages to a race emerging into notice along the coast of the yellow-surging North Sea: known already to their historians for straight blond hair falling over bluish gray eyes; large bodies with shapely white limbs; braggart voices, arrogant tempers; play-loving and fight-loving dispositions; ingrained honor and valor: their animal natures rooted in attachment to their country; and their spiritual natures soaring away toward an ideal of truth and strength set somewhere in a heaven. He was an offshoot of this old race, breeding stubbornly true on these late Kentucky fields.
"They are coming! They are coming at last!" cried Elizabeth, beckoning to him.
The boy got up and strolled over to the window and stood beside his sister, most unlike her: he springing from the land as rank as its corn; she being without a country, a little winged soul wandering through the universe, that merely by means of birth had alighted on Kentucky ground. At this moment beside the grave one-toned figure of her brother the many-colored nature of Elizabeth had its counterpart in the picture she offered to the eye; for the sunlight out of doors falling on the frost-jewelled window-panes spun a silvery radiance about the golden-red of the wind-woven hair, heightened the transparency of her skin, and stroked with softest pencil her little frock of forget-me-not blue. Had she been lifted to the window-frame, she would have looked like some portrait of herself done in stained glass—all atmosphered with seraphic brilliancy. As to the forget-me-not frock, everything that Elizabeth wore seemed to cherish her; her dresses bloomed about her thin, unbeautiful figure like flowers bent on hiding it, trained there by a mother's watchfulness.
"Now I am perfectly happy," she murmured, pressing her face fondly against his. "I was afraid it would be too cold for them to come."