It takes a long time to tell a thing, but you’ll make up your mind quick enough. Christina had hers determined, before she had made her way across the warm, smiling aftermath to the first line of sun-cocks.
Supposing Nelly didn’t care! Jim did. It was like a blow on a bruise for Christina to have to feel that this was true. But when she did, and saw what ought to be done, she lost no time.
“Jim!” she called out; and when he made no answer, “Jim!” again. Still he said nothing; only stood there, laughing. So then she shouted out, “Nelly! Nelly! look-at-here. See who’s in it!”
At the word, Nelly turned round, and in a second there she came, flying like a bird up the field, the sun shining on her shining hair, and her pink skirts floating this way and swelling that way, as she ran, and kept calling out, “Jim! Jim! is it yourself that’s in it, at all at all?”
She was like a bird, as I said, but a bird that was taking wing from a cage.
To tell the truth, she wasn’t caring so much about poor Mickey and his way of courting. She was listening to him, because she was too much surprised to do anything else, and besides she couldn’t really imagine he was in earnest, and was just letting him go stuttering on, and half inclined to laugh in his face, only she was too kind to do the like.... But of course she’d far liefer have a boy more her own age and gait of going to be looking out across the lake with, than Heffernan, Furry Farm and all. So off she ran from him and towards Jim.
There you have them all; Nelly running lightly from one end of the hayfield, and Christina stepping quickly from the other end of it, and they both making for Jim who was standing between them. Surely either of them would reach him quickly ... and of course, poor Christina was full sure he would go a piece of the way down to meet Nelly! But instead of that, he kept backing, and backing away from them; laughing always, but saying nothing.
“What are you at, Jim?” said Nelly, flushed and out of breath, but radiant with smiles of welcome. “Can’t you stop, and not be going on that-a-way?”
Still Jim kept moving, moving away from them; sliding across the field, and not a word out of his head, in spite of all Nelly could say. Then he got to the stone wall that ran round the Big Meadow; and then over with him, and Nelly and Christina coming after him.
When they got to the wall, they looked over it into the next field; a big, flat pasture-field it was; broad and open to the blazing sunshine. You’d think a mouse couldn’t stir there, without being seen. But sight nor light of Jim the sisters could not get there.