A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Laura had one more week at home and the thought tortured her even while it satisfied. She wanted to make the most of it, to hold it to her heart as one fondles a precious thing. There was something vaguely painful in seeing her father come home from the office, care-worn and tired, and her mother go monotonously over all the household tasks each day. They would miss her. But so would they miss her no matter what she might be doing away from them. She felt a sort of patient fondness for Trib, now that so soon she was to see him no more.

Trib was seventeen now,--a queer mixture of man and boy. All his young life he had ridden hobbies up hills of enthusiasm, abandoned them one by one, and trudged down into valleys of neglect, only to find there steeds of different hue and temperament. One year it had been an enthusiasm for carpentering, in which he had made countless tool chests and benches and more or less wobbly pieces of lattice-work. One year he had been an embryo naturalist, every waking moment spent in watching birds through Laura's opera glasses or constructing nests for them, every spoken sentence a statement concerning his feathered friends. He had filled all available places with wrens' nests, made a martin house large enough for all the relatives, both blood and law, that might arrive, and built various fancy habitations for bluebirds, brown thrashers and flickers. When the winged bipeds for which the houses were intended failed to understand his kind motives, and the sparrows moved in en masse, Trib abandoned the whole interest with superb scorn. There had been a year of photography, with part of the cellar curtained off into dungeon-like quarters, where one, venturing in, fell over old magic lanterns and electric light bulbs, became entangled in coils of wire and rolls of films. Eloise had been in a state of exasperation and actual concern over these various interests, dilating long and with much detail upon her difficulties with Trib. This summer he had grown strangely quiet and read too many lightweight magazines. Laura, looking at his sleek dark head bent over one, felt a warmth of tenderness for her young brother, a vague disquietude that she was not to be near any more, not again to be an amused and exasperated onlooker at those boyish enthusiasms.