Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/199

Rh express what the lines of the young man meant to her artistic sense. She liked the smell of the turpentine soap. It brought back, in an indefinable way, scenes of her babyhood when her father was painting the portrait of her mother. Above all, she liked the strange gurgling noise Spot made when he washed his face with great hands-full of water. She liked the noise so much that she had tried to imitate it when washing her own face in the china basin in her room, but Aunt Myra had heard her and sternly rebuked such vulgarity, and she had not attempted it again in her basin—but had been quite successful in the spring down in the cow pasture!

On this day Rebecca got safely to her seat on the top step before Spot arrived and had the satisfaction of seeing him swing around the corner of the house, his blue shirt open at the throat, Doctor following close to heel. Spot's hat was in his hand and his yellow hair was gleaming in the sun like ripe wheat. How could anyone look so like her father and be so different?

Her uncle did look at her in passing, and there was an amused expression on his countenance. What made him smile? Suddenly she remembered that her hair was plaited through