Dave was a big blond fellow now, as tall as Uncle Horace, and so healthy and handsome and wholesome that it did one’s heart good to look at him. I could see, sometimes, that the contrast between Dave and his puny Rob cut Uncle Horace to the heart.
The dear boy was a little queer and constrained to-night. For a while his manner cast a chill even upon my heart, and I am the optimistic one. But I reflected that it is not easy to explain yourself to a whole kitchen full of people and before a strange girl with the very brightest eyes you ever saw! And it is, of course, still less easy when your severe older half-brother, who acts as your mentor and pays your bills, is frowning at you in plain sight of the bright eyes.
When grandma had given him her welcome the color came into the dear boy’s face, and I was proud to have Alice Yorke see how handsome he was. We of the first family were all plain. We all have a nose that belongs to the Partridge stock and we don’t like it any the better because it is said to have come to this country in the first ship after the Mayflower. It is a nose that has certainly shown the true Pilgrim spirit of persistence. Dave and Estelle both have features of classic regularity. Indeed a summer visitor to Palmyra had scandalized Loveday by calling Dave a young Greek god. She said that “if he wa’n’t always all that a boy ought to be she didn’t want it said that he favored heathen mythologers.”
Alice Yorke had never seen him. She was a new friend of Estelle’s, having only lately come to Palmyra to live. Her father was a doctor and had taken the practice of old Dr. Fogg, who had been gathered to his fathers the summer before. She was just Estelle’s age—eighteen—a brunette with irregular features, a little “tip-tilted” nose and a wide mouth, with tiny uneven milk-white teeth. Nothing about her was remarkable except a pair of black eyes that were deep and soft and bright, all at once. She had a fascinating little lisp and seemed simple-hearted and childlike. Loveday said that she had “a way with her.” The quality which we call charm is always indescribable.
We were merry enough that night, and if I caught sight now and then of a cloud upon Dave’s face, it was generally when Cyrus’ near-sighted eyes were fixed upon him in a severely scrutinizing way that they had.
Alice Yorke had a light and sweet little voice, full of sentiment, such as I have only heard elsewhere in so great a degree in an Irish voice, and which one, strangely, never hears except in a youthful voice. She sang the old songs and hymns that grandma liked, “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” “Mary of the Wild Moor,” “How Happy is the Man Who Hears Instruction’s Warning Voice,” and “Gently Lord, Oh, Gently Lead Us.” And grandma joined in at the last, in her high-keyed, quavering old voice, which still had a pathetic trace of sweetness, like that which lingers in the higher tones of a worn-out harp.
Cyrus sang, too, and his strong bass seemed to uphold the light soprano, as the ether upholds the fluttering bird.
“I have such a slight voice,” Alice Yorke said, turning to Cyrus at the close of a song with a pretty deprecating air.
“But I never heard a sweeter one,” he answered. And we did think that Cyrus was coming on!
I caught the flicker of a smile under Dave’s blond moustache—a very imposing moustache for nineteen, but in fact Dave was almost twenty.