es uncurled themselves and spread, they made splendid feathers with
which to trim a hat or play at ostrich farms; but, best of all and most
fearsome, as the stems shot upwards and overtopped a child, the bracken
became a forest through which she hardly dared to walk, so dense and
interminable it was. To crawl up and down a fern-covered hillock needed
all Helen's resolution and she would emerge panting and wild-eyed,
blessing the open country and still watchful for what might follow her.
After that experience a mere game of hunters, with John and Rupert
roaring like lions and trumpeting like elephants, was a smaller though
glorious thing, and for hot and less heroic days there was the game of
dairymen, played in the reedy pool or in Halkett's stream with the aid
of old milk-cans of many sizes, lent to the Canipers by the lovable Mrs.
Brent.

In those days Mrs. Brent furnished them with their ideas of motherhood.
She seemed old to them because her husband was long dead and she was
stout, but she had a dark-eyed girl no older than John, and her she
kissed and nursed, scolded, teased and loved with a joyous confidence
which impressed the Canipers. Their stepmother rarely kissed, her
reprimands had not the familiarity of scoldings, and though she had a
sense of fun which could be reached and used with discretion, there was
no feeling of safety in her company. They were too young to realize that
this was because she was uncertain of herself, as that puckered mouth
revealed. That she loved them they believed; with all the aloofness of
their young souls they were thankful that she did not caress them; but
they liked to see Lily Brent fondled by her mother, and they themselves
suffered Mrs. Brent's endearments with a happy sense of
irresponsibility. It was Mrs. Brent who gave them hot cakes when they
went to the dairy to fetch butter or eggs, and who sometimes let them
skim the milk and eventually lick the ladle, but she was chiefly
wonderful because she could tell them about Mr. Pinderwell. Poor Mr.
Pinderwell was the late owner of the Canipers' home. He had lived for
more than fifty years in the house chosen and furnished for a bride who
had softly fallen ill on the eve of her wedding-day and softly died, and
Mr. Pinderwell, distracted by his loss, had come to live in the big,
lonely house and had grown old and at last died there, in the hall, with
no voice to bewail him but the ticking of the grandfather clock. Going
on her d