Page:Dark Hester.djvu/41

ROBIN was in his little waterproof hood and cape, all shining in the rain, and her delight at seeing him was so great that she had not time for surprise. He was marvellously like Clive at the same age.—‘Mouse-face,’ she had used to say to her little son, tilting back the face to kiss it; and Robin’s hood framed the same broad brow and narrow chin. His eyes were darker than his father’s and his pallor more golden; but there was the same austerely sweet modelling of the cheek and lip, the same pale, bright hair. Yes, he, too, was the colour of amber, exquisite little creature.

And there went Hester’s rubber boots beside him; she still wore rubber boots in rainy weather and they certainly became her slender form, her small foot, her indolent and decisive gait. As she glanced up, behind her rain-driven pane, at Hester’s face, a phrase from a pitiful little tale of Maupassant’s came to her mind: ‘Elle est ben trop noire’ the old peasant mother had said of the proposed negress daughter-in-law, reiteration her only argument. What if, on first seeing Hester, she had relapsed to the same animal antipathy and said to Clive: