CHAPTER II
The little figure in the corner of the pink sofa had read away the hours of the short winter afternoon curled up in a ball, her soft red dress, her soft red cheeks, her soft red lips vivid bits of colour in the lamplight. She had read through the twilight, until the lamps came to help her pretty eyes, and like a scholar of old over some problem she bent above her fairy tale. The volume was unwieldy, and she supported it on her knees. Close to her side a little boy of six watched the absorbed face, watched the lamp and the shadows of the lamp on the pink walls of the room; watched his mother as she sat sewing, but most devotedly of all he watched through his half-dreaming lids his sister as she read her story. His sister charmed him very much and terrified him not a little; she was so quick, so strong, so alive—she rushed him so. He loved his sister, she was his illustrated library of fairy tales and wonderful plays, she was his companion, his ruler, his dominator, and his best friend.
"Bella," he whispered at the second when she turned the page and he thought he might venture to interrupt, "Bella, wouldn't you read it to me?"
The absorbed child made an impatient gesture, bent her head lower and snuggled down into her feast. She shook her mane of hair.
"Gardiner," his mother noticed the appeal, "when will you learn to read for yourself? You are a big boy."
"Oh, I'm not so vewy big," his tone was indolent, "I'm not so big as Bella. You said yesterday that you bought me five-year-old clothes."
In the distance, above the noise of the wind, came the tinkle of the car-bell. Gardiner silently wished, as he heard the not unmusical sound, that the eternal, ugly little cars, with the overworked horses, could
be turned into fairy chariots and this one, as it came ringing and tinkling along, would stop at the front door and fetch.... A loud ring at the front door made the little boy spring up.