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Her brown eyes were level with his grey ones; her hands were on her hips, while his arms were folded across his breast. "Hullo, Napoleon!" Miriam said. "Good-morning, Lily. Is he being tiresome? He looks it." "We're only arguing," she said. "We often do it." This was the little girl whom Mrs. Brent, now in her ample grave, had slapped and kissed and teased, to the edification of the Canipers.
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.
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.
Those eyes and the four mouths curved, in their different ways, for passion and resolve, seemed to be making courteous mock of her; yet three at least of the Canipers were conscious only of pity for her loneliness behind the shining table. "After all," she said, trying to be at ease, "there is not much to tell you; but I felt that, perhaps, you have never understood your father very well."
Sitting next to John, with her arm in his, Lily moved a little. Her eyes were full of pity, not so much for the woman upstairs, or for the Canipers, as because the emotions of these people were not the heartily unmixed ones which she had suffered when her own mother died. "He's a long time," Helen said.
She had promised to marry George because Miriam had been lying on the floor, because, years ago, the woman lying alone in Pinderwell House had brought the Canipers to the moor where George lived and was brutal and was going to marry her. But it could not be true, for, in some golden past, before this ugliness fell between her and beauty, she had promised to marry Zebedee.
"All right, all right." "Got something to keep you quiet?" "Greek grammar." "Good man. Now then!" He plunged across the hall as though it were an icy bath. In the candle-lighted dining-room, Mildred Caniper sat by a wood fire. The table barricaded her from the four Canipers who sat and looked at her with serious eyes, and suddenly she found that she had very little to say.
The Canipers had lived on the moor for sixteen years, and Rupert was the only one of the children who had more distant memories.
Long ago, out of excess of loyalty, the Canipers had tacitly agreed not to discuss those matters on which their stepmother was determinedly reserved, and now a certain tightening of the atmosphere revealed the fact that John and Helen were controlling their desires to ask Rupert what he meant.
She looked up at the poplars and saw that they would soon have their leaves to peep into the windows and whisper secrets of the Canipers. "They knew," she said solemnly, "they always knew what was to happen." Beyond the garden door she walked into a dark, damp world: mist was settling on the moor; drops spangled her dress and rested softly on her face and hands.
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