“He scowled fearfully when he saw me and the bundles. Then he laughed a little. Some people hurt your feelings worse when they laugh than when they scowl. ‘So you are at the bottom of this—this little midnight excursion?’ he said to me. And he said something to Dave out of the Bible; something about Adam letting Eve make him eat the apple. I think he was the more mad with me because he was disappointed that Dave hadn’t come on purpose to see Rob. He wants everybody to think everything of Rob although he is often very cross to him himself.”
I thought the nine-year-old eyes were quite too keen, and it was a relief when she enforced her position by adding, “Octavia says so, anyway.”
“He took away our bundles and Marcella, the housekeeper, put me to bed. It was in the next room to Rob’s and I could hear his breathing and hear Dave telling the stories. I went to sleep and woke up again and he was still going on—such a sleepy-head as Dave is, too. He will do anything for Rob; he always would, even before his asthma was so bad. If he catches a big trout he lets Rob pretend that he caught it, and he tried to get me to do Rob’s arithmetic for him, when it was cheating. He would have done it himself if he could. And yet for himself I don’t think Dave ever cheats. You see, it is very hard for me to keep Dave straight when Rob isn’t—well, isn’t so very particular.” The little peaked face was grave with responsibility.
“Are you the girl who persuaded her brother to run away?” I said solemnly.
She burst into tears, and threw her arms around my neck.
“Was it bad when I only wanted to get where we belonged, and weren’t in the way?” she said. “And I left my berry and my bantam money behind, in my apple bank, in hopes that Cyrus would go to college after we were gone.”
I talked to her for a long time, but I could see that I influenced her only when I told her what a great helper she could be to us all. When I convinced her of that she smiled like an April sun and promised never to run away again. And from that day it was pitiful to see her wait upon and try to propitiate Cyrus, who either was or assumed to be as loftily unconscious of her present attentions as he had been of her previous “making faces.”
This was the only result of the children’s troublesome escapade, except that we were careful never to speak of them as “aliens” again, and we all of us had, I think, a little snugger place for them in our hearts, even Uncle Horace, although he shook his head and said the girl showed that she had something besides Partridge-blood in her veins.
I am not sure whether the comradeship between Dave and Rob increased from that time, or whether we only observed it more. But they were constantly together and Estelle, I knew, still kept an increasing vigilance over the trout-catching and the arithmetic. She was extremely quick at mathematics, herself, and she really succeeded in making Dave ambitious in that direction, but chiefly, I think, that he might be able to help Rob by fair means.
Rob was hindered so much by his attacks of asthma that it was difficult to say whether he was really dull or only backward. Dave, although less than two years his senior, was reluctantly preparing for college while Rob was still in the grammar school. Cyrus had by this time set his heart upon having Dave go to college.