Granny won my heart, though, by one thing. She was always kind to Cuthbert, just as kind as she was to me. I believe she took him as a matter of course. We were both strangers to her, he not much more than her own grandson. Besides, Cuthbert's bright face and ways won her heart. 'The boy has such a pretty tongue,' she used to say. He welcomed her more readily than I did, for he could not compare her, as I was for ever doing, with my mother.
I told Hildred one day how good Granny was to Cuthbert.
'Perhaps she likes him best,' Hildred said, throwing an apple up into the air and catching it.
'Oh, do you think so?'
It was a new thought to me. I pondered over it a great deal when I was alone.
Very likely most people would like Cuthbert best. My mother of course, would always have cared for me the most, but now it was different and I should not be first any longer.
Cuthbert wondered why I went up to him that evening and put my arm over his shoulder. He was hard at work mending a net for our cherry-tree, so he only just looked up and nodded.
No wonder everybody liked that happy face of his. In truth, I think there could not have been happier children than we were.
As the quick months and years passed over our heads, the trouble that never could be cured kept gliding away, further and further back into some very far-off past, until at last it seemed to me that it was not I who had lived here with my mother, but another boy, a much smaller, graver boy—a better boy, too, perhaps—but very different from what I was now. I looked back at him half wonderingly, half regretfully, through a sort of mist of brightness and light. It must have been so easy for him to be good alone with his mother, and hearing nothing day by day but her good words. What would she have done with the big rough fellow that had grown by degrees into her little boy's place? Would he have been quiet and gentle enough for her, if she had lived? Yes, all the time I felt a sort of certainty that she would have loved me, nay, that she did love me still. And I should like to have let her know, that though of course I had got into a harder life—a life in most things far unlike what it used to be when she was with me—yet that I still often remembered and wished to obey her words, that I should try to be good without her always. But these thoughts I never spoke, even to Cuthbert.
I was a child when Cuthbert came, I was a boy now, and he had helped to make me one. From the first time I saw him climb the outside of the Queen's Tower, swinging himself upwards from branch to branch of the old ivy, he became my pattern: I resolved to follow him, and if it made Granny scream to see us, why, so much the better.