"It's true," she said bravely, as if they had looked at those closed doors together and she were answering his thought. "I'm an old woman and I've lost the way to fairyland. So I want you to go with Sheila in my place. I want you to guard her dream—and keep her safe, too. I'm afraid for her, Peter—I'm afraid!"
"Dear Mrs. Caldwell, how can I walk where your foot is too heavy?" And Peter's voice was very gentle.
"Ask your poets that. I was never one for the poets. I can sew a fine seam and make my garden grow—nothing more. But you have the store of poetry—and you have youth."
"There," said Peter, pointing to a lad of fourteen or thereabout who was coming toward them, "there is what Sheila calls youth."
"And there," retorted Mrs. Caldwell, "is what I call the heavy foot. But Theodore Kent is a good boy. He's just not good enough for Sheila. I can't understand the child's liking him!"
Theodore came up to them briskly, his cap off, his yellow-brown hair shining in the sunlight with a vigorous glory, his face ruddy and smiling. His body and his features were alike, strong and somewhat bluntly fashioned, the body and the features of the very sturdy, closely akin to the earth's health and kindliness.
"Where's Sheila, Mrs. Caldwell?" he asked, happily unconscious of a critical atmosphere.
"In the back garden. What do you want, Ted?"
He lifted a battered volume. "She promised to help me with this rhetoric stuff," he announced, quite unabashed at the admission of Sheila's superior cleverness.
"Well, run along and find her." And Mrs. Caldwell glanced at Peter as if to add, "Didn't I tell you he wasn't good enough for Sheila?"