Her happiest hours were those which she spent alone with Sheila and Quixtus. Since the cloud had been lifted from his soul he loved the child with a new tenderness, thus inarticulately expressing his gratitude to God for having put it into his heart to love her while the cloud hung heavy. And Clementina knew this, and invested his relations with the child in a curious sanctity. She loved to share with him the child’s affection in actual physical presence. The late afternoon was Sheila’s hour. Clementina would sit with them beneath the great cedar tree on the lawn and listen to the stories he had learned to pour into Sheila’s insatiable ears. They were mostly odds and ends of folk-lore. But now and then she suspected heterogeneous strains; and one day she called out;
“Are you inventing all that, Ephraim?”
He confessed with the air of a detected schoolboy.
“To hear you playing the deuce with folk-lore which you regard as a strict and sacred science amazes me. From you it sounds almost immoral.”
Quixtus fingered the soft curls. “What,” said he, “is all the science in the world compared with this little head?”
Clementina was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly. “You feel like that, too, do you?”
Quixtus nodded and dreamed over the curls.
“But what happened to the princess and the Ju-Ju man?” demanded Sheila, and Quixtus had to pursue his immoral course.
August melted into September, and September drew to its close. Admiral Concannon and Etta and all the boys and girls, save Tommy, had gone, and Huckaby was busy with the repacking of books and specimens. The weather had broken. The trees dripped with rain and the leaves began to fall. Mists rose from the meadows by the river and a blue haze, sweet and sad, enveloped the low-lying hills. In the garden the sunflowers, a week before so glorious, hung their heads with a dying grace. The birds, even the thrushes, were mute. The hour under the cedar tree had become the hour of deepening twilight by the fireside. The idyll was over. London called. . . .