"As soon as he has folded the sheep—that is, about eight o'clock," said the shepherd.
And a little after eight, just as Fairy, after a deal of puckering of her pretty brows, had given up her sums in despair, Jack came in. He was a tall, fine, handsome lad of seventeen, darker than his brothers and more like Mrs. Shelley than the shepherd in appearance, with a look of keen, quick intelligence in his brown eyes, and a sweet smile which lighted up his whole face. He was quick in all his actions, and had laid aside his hated crook and changed his clothes, and washed and seated himself by Fairy's side before he had been ten minutes in the house. Mrs. Shelley looked with pride at her darling son as he bent his curly brown head over Fairy's slate, and in his clear voice, quite free from the Sussex brogue in which his parents and brothers spoke, explained decimal fractions to her.
Jack's manner to Fairy was rather a puzzle to his mother, for while it was more deferential than the shepherd's and less familiar than Charlie's, who, when he was clean, Fairy allowed to be on brotherly terms with her, at the same time he assumed a tone of intellectual superiority which Fairy quite acquiesced in and seemed to think quite natural, and yet she ordered him about just as she did the other boys, and he was certainly never so happy as when in her presence and doing her bidding.
Sometimes Mrs. Shelley feared for her boy's happiness, for though Fairy was only a child in age and everything else, Jack was five years older, and already his mother dreaded lest his affection and admiration should develop into a stronger feeling, although, for she was very ambitious for her boy, if she could know that in the far future Fairy would respond to the feeling, hope, and not fear, would have been the feeling with which she watched them.
When the sums were finished, Mrs. Shelley laid the cloth for supper, while Jack and Fairy discussed their plans for the next day.
"Where is father?" asked Jack, suddenly.
"Now coming in to supper; he is cross with you, you naughty boy, because you have not set the wheatear traps properly, and he only caught two dozen," said Fairy.
These wheatear traps are excavations in the turf, about a foot long, in the shape of a T. The birds run up the trenches and get entangled by the head in a noose.
"Well, that is five or six shillings, and there'll be another two dozen poor little things snared to-morrow," said Jack.
"More, I expect, Jack; your father has been after the traps himself this evening; but here he is, so don't mention them unless he does. Look what Fairy and I have been making for you, Jack. Show him, Fairy," said Mrs. Shelley, who was making a huge hasty pudding over the fire for supper.