The Stepson by Martin Armstrong Page A

patting a horse. ‘You’re an angel, Mrs. J.,’ he said, grinning; and seeing him so gay and affectionate with the old woman, Kate felt a little stab of jealousy.
    â€˜Not me,’ Mrs. Jobson answered him. ‘I’ve got nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Mrs. Humphrey you’ve got to thank.’
    David looked across to Kate with shining eyes. ‘Why,’ she thought to herself again, ‘he’s still only a child, after all.’
    â€˜How did you know?’ he asked her.
    â€˜What’s this? What’s this?’ said old Ben, looking up suddenly from his carving.
    â€˜This cake,’ explained David. ‘It’s a plum-cake.’
    Old Ben smiled broadly. ‘The devil it is!’ he said. He turned to Kate. ‘And you made it?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said, ‘I did.’
    â€˜But who told you that plum-cake was David’s special cake?’ He had quite forgotten that he himself had told her.
    â€˜Perhaps nobody told me,’ answered Kate. ‘Perhaps I just knew.’
    â€˜Mrs. J. told you,’ said David.
    â€˜Never!’ Mrs. Jobson asserted. ‘The first I knew of it was when Mrs. Humphrey told me she was going to make one.’
    â€˜If you want to know,’ said Kate, ‘it was a little bird told me.’
    Ben laughed his sharp laugh. ‘That little bird gets a lot blamed on him, poor little devil.’
    He had finished the carving for Kate and himself; Mrs. Jobson went out of the room, and soon they were all three eating. Their first constraint had almost gone and the talk grew easier and freer.
    Ben and his son began to talk of sheep. When David returned to The Grange they were to go in for sheep on a larger scale than hitherto, and it had been with this object that David had been living on a sheep-farm since the previous autumn, and was to continue there until he had completed a year. In the intervals of their talk, David, glancing across the table, would discover the level black brows and the grey-green eyes of his stepmother steadily fixed upon him. It was an honest, open gaze, so frank that it did not embarrass him. He liked her already. There was something staid and matronly about her beauty that made her seem in his youthful eyes a woman not too young to be his father’s wife or his own stepmother. And so from time to time he met her gazewith a friendly eye that mutely invited her into the conversation.
    But Kate did not talk much. She was happier listening to the two men talking together; for, as she listened to them and watched them, the reality was gradually becoming more real to her, and gradually and almost unconsciously her heart was growing reconciled to resigning the young boy of her dreams.
    And in the course of the next few days, as she and David settled down into a comfortable familiarity, she began to feel that a cordial, elder-sisterly relationship with this sweet-tempered young man would bring to her life at The Grange all that she had hitherto missed there. David’s presence seemed to transform the place, not only for her, but for everybody. And yet that presence was an unobtrusive one. He went about his affairs quietly, a little self-absorbed, it seemed, but never listless. When Kate met him about the house or out-of-doors she received the impression that he was always quietly bent upon something quite definite. In the house, when alone, he often sang to himself. His voice was sweet and true, and when he sang it was no half-conscious droning, like the singing of most people who sing when they are occupied with other things; for David always sang the words with the tunes, singing the song through to the end and then beginning another.
    And that quietness of his was a cheerful quietness. If he went on his own way and did not often seekout occasions for talk, he always spoke without hesitation when speech was necessary and responded readily when spoken to, with a good-humour