“A week later, on a summer afternoon, we got here. I had never seen the inside of a big house or the open expanse of the sea before, never been in a stable yard, where there were chickens and cats and horses. And we had half-a-dozen horses at Wastewater then, Uncle Tom’s big Percherons, and riding horses.
“Why, I couldn’t get enough of the stairs—I worked my way up and down them for days, singing to myself for pure rapture. It was all a fairy tale to me; the silver, the meals, the big rooms—what a wonderland it was!
“Uncle Tom was a widower with two sons, boys of thirteen and eleven—Roger and Will. They were out in the stable yards with some puppies when we got there, and Roger was not too big a boy to take a little girl cousin under his wing—he showed me the puppies, he let me name one of them ‘Silver.’
“I have never seen any other puppies that were to me as—as strangely important as those were,” Flora went on, her eyes closed, her voice the mere essence of its usual self. “Nor such a lingering early summer afternoon as that was! It seemed to me my heart would burst with joy. To have supper in the pantry that was full of maids and sunshine, and such supplies of cake and butter and milk, and to sleep in a big smooth bed, in such a great room——
“All those early days were filled with anxiety for me. I was afraid any instant that we might be sent away. My mother told me long afterward that I cried myself almost sick with excitement when she told me that Uncle Tom had asked her to stay and take care of his house for him. I don’t remember that, but I remember in my gratitude telling Roger that I hoped some day he would be out at sea in a wreck, and that I would save his life—and how he laughed at me.
“He was, I suppose, as handsome a boy as ever lived—it was not that. Surely I was too small a girl to know or care what real beauty was! But I loved him from the first instant I saw him.
“Not—I think now—as other children love, as other young girls love. There was no vanity in it—I can say that. There was no happiness, no prettiness. It was agony to me, almost from that first June afternoon.
“He seemed to me to be in a class all by himself. Whether I liked it or not—and it was years before I realized it fully—I had to keep him there! His least word was important, his kindness made me tremble all over, and if ever Roger were cross with me, I used to be actually sick with grief, and my mother would ask him to come up to my room and let me sob wildly in his arms and beg him to forgive me.
“I never got any pleasure out of it, God knows. It was constant pain. If he smiled at any one else, I was wretched. No matter what he did, his laugh, his voice with his horse, his use of his hands—and he had beautiful hands!—was full of magic for me. I used to pray—to pray that he would not always seem so wonderful to me, that I would see him in ordinary human daylight. I never did. He was my whole world.
“So the years went by, and Uncle Tom died, and Roger was the heir. Roger was twenty-five then, tall and straight, and so clever that he could do anything! He rode and he sang, he danced and shot better than any of his friends. Women were already beginning—ah, how women loved him!