For Caleb heard the short gasp which
came from the boy's lips, even before the little girl had paused in her
darting advance, on tip-toe like a hovering butterfly, to wave a slim
hand at him.
Caleb heard the boy's breath suck in between tight teeth; heard it
quiver unsteadily as she appeared on swift feet--and Caleb understood
what had been holding so closely his attention. He understood
absolutely and yet, strange as the mood was, at that moment he couldn't
help but feel, too, somehow a little sorry for the boy--he couldn't
help but think---- His eyes went from Steve's forward thrust head,
from the hair shaggy and unkempt for all its fineness and thickness and
wavy softness, across to that dainty vision which, poised in her
absurdly short skirt like a point of flame, was already gazing back at
the boy upon the steps in open and undisguised amaze.
All of that characteristic which had been most pronounced in Dexter
Allison, the latter had passed down to this slender girl who was his
daughter, Barbara. No matter how vivid Allison's raiment had been,
Caleb remembered that even when Dexter was a stripling at school, it
had always seemed more a part of the man himself, than just protection
for his body. Caleb had never given it a serious thought up to that
moment, but now it came back to him with added cumulative force. He
recollected that he had often wondered at the child's unconscious
adaptation of mood to the clothes she happened to be wearing; he
recalled how he had seen her demure and distant in misty, pastel-tinted
party frocks or quaintly, infantilely dignified in soberer Sunday
morning garb.
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