"Harry!" she screamed, and the wind blew her cry to you across the meadow, but you ran on, unheeding. She struggled after you. The daisies brushed her skirt. Creeping vines caught at her little shoes and she fell. Scratched by briers, she scrambled to her feet again and stumbled on, blind with tears, crying ever "Harry, Harry!" but so faintly now in her sobs and breathlessness that you did not hear. At the top of a weary, weary slope she sank helpless and heartbroken in the grass, a little huddle of curls and pinafore, so that your conscience smote you as you stood waiting, half hidden by the hedge.
"Don't be a cry-baby. I was only fooling," you said, and at the sound of your voice Lizbeth lifted her face from the grasses and put out her arms to you with a cry. In one hand was the little pear.
"Oh, I don't want the old thing," you cried, throwing yourself beside her on the turf. Smiling again through her tears, Lizbeth reached out a little hand scratched by briers, and patted your cheek.
"Harry," she said, "you can have all my animal crackers for your m'nagerie, if you want to, and my little brown donkey; and I'll play horse with you any time you want me to, Harry, I will."
So, after all, you did not run away, and you and Lizbeth went home at last across the meadow, hand in hand. Behind you, hidden and forgotten in the red clover, lay your quarrel and the little pear.
When Lizbeth loved you, there were stars in her brown eyes; when you looked more closely, so that you were very near their shining, you saw in their round, black pupils, smiling back at you, the face of a little boy; and then in your own eyes, Lizbeth, holding your cheeks between her hands, found the face of a little girl.
"Why, it's me!" she cried.
And when you looked again into Lizbeth's eyes, you saw yourself; and "Oh, Mother," you said afterwards, for you had thought deeply, "I think it's the good Harry that's in Lizbeth's eyes, 'cause when I look at him, he's always smiling." That was as far as you thought about it then; but once, long afterwards, it came to you that little boys never find their pictures in a sister's eyes unless they are good, and love her, and hold her cheeks between their hands.
Lizbeth's cheeks were softer than yours, and when she played horse, or the day was windy, so that the grass rippled and the trees sang, or when it was tub-day with soap and towels up-stairs, her cheeks were pink as the roses in Mother's garden. That is how you came to tell Mother a great secret, one evening in summer, as you sat with her and Lizbeth on the front steps watching the sun go down.
"I guess it's tub-day in the sky, Mother."