Next to Jerrold and little Colin Anne loved Eliot. He seemed to know when she was thinking about her mother and to understand. He took her into the woods to look for squirrels; he showed her the wildflowers and told her all their names: bugloss, and lady's smock and speedwell, king-cup, willow herb and meadow sweet, crane's bill and celandine.
One day they found in the garden a tiny egg-shaped shell made of gold-coloured lattice work. When they put it under the microscope they saw inside it a thing like a green egg. Every day they watched it; it put out two green horns, and a ridge grew down the middle of it, and one morning they found the golden shell broken. A long, elegant fly with slender wings crawled beside it.
When Benjy died of eating too much lettuce Eliot was sorry. Aunt Adeline said it was all put on and that he really wanted to cut him up and see what he was made of. But Eliot didn't. He said Benjy was sacred. That was because he knew they loved him. And he dug the grave and lined it with moss and told Aunt Adeline to shut up when she said it ought to have been lettuce leaves.
Aunt Adeline complained that it was hard that Eliot couldn't be nice to her when he was her favorite.
"Little Anne, little Anne, what have you done to my Eliot?" She was always saying things like that. Anne couldn't think what she meant till Jerrold told her she was the only kid that Eliot had ever looked at. The big Hawtrey girl from Medlicote would have given her head to be in Anne's shoes.
But Anne didn't care. Her love for Jerrold was sharp and exciting. She brought tears to it and temper. It was mixed up with God and music and the deaths of animals, and sunsets and all sorrowful and beautiful and mysterious things. Thinking about her mother made her think about Jerrold; but she never thought about Eliot at all when he wasn't there.
She would run away from Eliot any minute if she heard Jerrold calling.
It was Jerrold, Jerrold, all the time, said Aunt Adeline.
And when Eliot was busy with his microscope and Jerrold had turned from her to Colin, there was Uncle Robert. He seemed to know the moments when she wanted him. Then he would take her out riding with him over the estate that stretched from Wyck across the valley of the Speed and beyond it for miles over the hills. And he would show her the reaping machines at work, and the great carthorses, and the prize bullocks in their stalls at the Manor Farm. And Anne told him her secret, the secret she had told to nobody but Jerrold.
"Some day," she said, "I shall have a farm, with horses and cows and pigs and little calves."
"Shall you like that?"