It was the first time a girl had ever kissed him. The next day from early morning until bed-time was one long joy to
Stephen, and there were few things of interest that Harold had not been
shown; there were few of the little secrets which had not been shared
with him as they went about hand in hand. Like all manly boys Harold was
good to little children and patient with them. He was content to follow
Stephen about and obey all her behests. He had fallen in love with her
to the very bottom of his boyish heart. When the guests were going, Stephen stood with her father on the steps to
see them off. When the carriage had swept behind the farthest point in
the long avenue, and when Harold's cap waving from the window could no
longer be seen, Squire Norman turned to go in, but paused in obedience to
the unconscious restraint of Stephen's hand. He waited patiently till
with a long sigh she turned to him and they went in together. That night before she went to bed Stephen came and sat on her father's
knee, and after sundry pattings and kissings whispered in his ear:

'Daddy, wouldn't it be nice if Harold could come here altogether? Couldn't you ask him to? And old Mr. Harold could come too. Oh, I wish
he was here!' CHAPTER IV--HAROLD AT NORMANSTAND


Two years afterwards a great blow fell upon Harold. His father, who had
been suffering from repeated attacks of influenza, was, when in the low
condition following this, seized with pneumonia, to which in a few days
he succumbed. Harold was heart-broken. The affection which had been
between him and his father had been so consistent that he had never known
a time when it was not. When Squire Norman had returned to the house with him after the funeral,
he sat in silence holding the boy's hand till he had wept his heart out. By this time the two were old friends, and the boy was not afraid or too
shy to break down before him. There was sufficient of the love of the
old generation to begin with trust in the new. Presently, when the storm was past and Harold had become his own man
again, Norman said:

'And now, Harold, I want you to listen to me. You know, my dear boy,
that I am your father's oldest friend, and right sure I am that he would
approve of what I say. You must come home with me to live. I know that
in his last hours the great concern of your dear father's heart would
have been for the future of his boy. And I know, too, that it was a
comfort to him to feel that you and I are such friends, and that the son
of my dearest old friend would be as a son to me. We have been friends,
you and I, a long time, Harold; and we have learned to trust, and I hope
to love, one another. And you and my little Stephen are such friends
already that your coming into the house will be a joy to us all. Why,
long ago, when first you came, she said to me the night you went away:
"Daddy, wouldn't it be nice if Harold could come here altogether?"' And so Harold An Wolf came back with the Squire to Normanstand, and from
that day on became a member of his house, and as a son to him. Stephen's
delight at his coming was of course largely qualified by her sympathy
with his grief; but it would have been hard to give him more comfort than
she did in her own pretty way. Putting her lips to his she kissed him,
and holding his big hand in both of her little ones, she whispered
softly:

'Poor Harold! You and I should love each other, for we have both lost
our mother. And now you have lost your father. But you must let my dear
daddy be yours too!' At this time Harold was between fourteen and fifteen years old. He was
well educated in so far as private teaching went. His father had devoted
much care to him, so that he was well grounded in all the Academic
branches of learning. He was also, for his years, an expert in most
manly exercises. He could ride anything, shoot straight, fence, run,
jump or swim with any boy more than his age and size. In Normanstand his education was continued by the rector. The Squire
used often to take him with him when he went to ride, or fish, or shoot;
frankly telling him that as his daughter was, as yet, too young to be his
companion in these matters, he would act as her locum tenens. His living
in the house and his helping as he did in Stephen's studies made
familiarity perpetual. He was just enough her senior to command her
childish obedience; and there were certain qualities in his nature which
were eminently calculated to win and keep the respect of women as well as
of men. He was the very incarnation of sincerity, and had now and again,
in certain ways, a sublime self-negation which, at times, seemed in
startling contrast to a manifestly militant nature. When at school he
had often been involved in fights which were nearly always on matters of
principle, and by a sort of unconscious chivalry he was generally found
fighting on the weaker side. Harold's father had been very proud of his
ancestry, which was Gothic through the Dutch, as the manifestly corrupted
prefix of the original name implied, and he had gathered from a constant
study of the Sagas something of the philosophy which lay behind the ideas
of the Vikings. This new stage of Harold's life made for quicker development than any
which had gone before. Hitherto he had not the same sense of
responsibility. To obey is in itself a relief; and as it is an actual
consolation to weak natures, so it is only a retarding of the strong. Now
he had another individuality to think of. There was in his own nature a
vein of anxiety of which the subconsciousness of his own strength threw
up the outcrop. Little Stephen with the instinct of her sex discovered before long this
weakness. For it is a weakness when any quality can be assailed or used. The using of a man's weakness is not always coquetry; but it is something
very like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired
the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded,
would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an
elfin delight in his discomfiture. The result of Stephen's harmless little coquetries was that Harold had
occasionally either to thwart some little plan of daring, or else cover
up its results. In either case her confidence in him grew, so that
before long he became an established fact in her life, a being in whose
power and discretion and loyalty she had absolute, blind faith. And this
feeling seemed to grow with her own growth. Indeed at one time it came
to be more than an ordinary faith. It happened thus:

The old Church of St. Stephen, which was the parish church of
Normanstand, had a peculiar interest for the Norman family. There,
either within the existing walls or those which had preceded them when
the church was rebuilt by that Sir Stephen who was standard-bearer to
Henry VI., were buried all the direct members of the line. It was an
unbroken record of the inheritors since the first Sir Stephen, who had
his place in the Domesday Book.