Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/210

204 per, Tom Brighton on the other, while the three younger members of the party watched them wonderingly from the other end of the table. Everything, for the moment, seemed forgotten except the old comradeship of their boyhood. The only reminder of the unhappy days just passed lay in the atmosphere of relief and peacefulness that seemed to pervade the whole house.

The windows stood wide open and the morning wind came in to lift the long curtains and to stir the great bowl of flowers on the table. Oliver, hungrily devouring chicken and rolls and bacon and sausages and hot waffles with maple sirup, was saying little but was listening earnestly to the jokes and laughter of Cousin Jasper. After a day and night of anxiety, depression, struggle, and victory, he seemed suddenly to have become a new man. They were talking, the three elders, of their early adventures together, but Oliver noticed that the reminiscences never traveled beyond a certain year, that their stories would go forward to the time when they were nearly grown, and then would slip back to their younger days again. Some black memory was laid across the happy recollection of their friendship, cutting off all that came after; yet they talked and laughed easily of the bright, remote happiness that was common to them all. The boy noticed, also, as they sat together, that Anthony was like the others in certain ways, that his eyes could light with the same merriment as Cousin Jasper's,