Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick — Read

Robin was in his little waterproof hood and cape, all shining in the rain, and her delight at seeing him was so great that she had not time for surprise. He was marvellously like Clive at the same age. -‘Mouse-face,' she had used to say to her little son, tilting back the face to kiss it; and Robin's hood framed the same broad brow and narrow chin. His eyes were darker than his father's and his pallor more golden; but there was the same austerely sweet modelling of the cheek and lip, the same pale, bright hair. Yes, he, too, was the colour of amber, exquisite little creature.

And there went Hester's rubber boots beside him; she still wore rubber boots in rainy weather and they certainly became her slender form, her small foot, her indolent and decisive gait. As she glanced up, behind her rain-driven pane, at Hester's face, a phrase from a pitiful little tale of Maupassant's came to her mind: ‘_Elle est ben trop noire_' the old peasant mother had said of the proposed negress daughter-in-law, reiteration her only argument. What if, on first seeing Hester, she had relapsed to the same animal antipathy and said to Clive: ‘_Elle est ben trop noire_'? Could it possibly have parted him from Hester? But Hester was not _trop noire_. It was absurd and malicious to say it. She was the nut-brown maid in type. -‘And as sound as a nut,' Monica muttered. Her brooding loneliness set her mind singing to these chimes, but this involuntary tribute cheered her. She did not hate Hester if she thought her as sound as a nut. And, keeping her place at the window, she heard her say: ‘Come on, Robin; -don't dawdle,' in her rational, unadmonishing voice. Hester was a just and careful mother, but his grandmother felt sure that Robin must miss the ardent, playful improvisation and gaiety that had shone about his father's childhood.