wrote his memoirs, that moved with difficulty from boyhood, so detailed were his recollections and so painstaking his recording of inessential fact.

For their few neighbors, life went on as slowly as for the Carmichaels. The Carstons of Carlowrie House were in touch with a larger outside life: Sir Alec Carston was member for the county; but the inmates of Brechin House, Crail Hill, and Newton Lowry were fixtures. These dim personages hardly counted at all in young Eppie’s experience. She saw them gathered round the tea-table in the library when she was summoned to appear with tidy hair and fresh frock: stout, ruddy ladies in driving-gloves and boat-shaped hats; dry, thin young ladies in hard-looking muslins and with frizzed fringes; a solid laird or two. They were vague images in her world.

People who really counted were the village people, and on the basis of her aunts’ charitable relationship Eppie built up for herself with most of them a tyrannous friendship. The village was over two miles away; one reached it by the main road that ran along the moor, past the birch-woods, the tiny loch, and then down a steep bit of hill to the handful of huddled gray roofs. There was the post-office, the sweet-shop with its dim, small panes, behind which, to Eppie’s imagination, the bull’s-eyes and toffee and Edinburgh rock looked, in their jars, like odd fish in an aquarium; there was the carpenter’s shop, the floor all heaped with scented shavings, through which one’s feet shuffled in delightful, dry rustlings; there the public-house, a lurid corner building, past which Miss Grimsby always hurried her over-interested young charge, and there the little inn where one ordered the dusty, lurching, capacious old fly that conveyed one to the station, five miles away. Eppie was far more in the village than her share of her aunts’ charities at all justified, and was often brought in disgrace from sheer truancy. The village babies, her dolls, and Robbie, her Aberdeen terrier, were the realities at once serious and radiant of life. She could do for them, love them as she would. Her uncle and aunts and the fond old nurse were included in an unquestioning tenderness, but they could not be brought under its laws, and their independence made them more remote.

Remote, too, though by no means independent, and calling forth little tenderness, were her cousins, who spent part of their holidays each summer at Kirklands. They were English boys, coming from an English school, and Eppie was very stanchly Scotch. The Graingers, Jim and Clarence, were glad young animals. They brought from a home of small means and overflowing sisters uncouth though not bad manners and an assured tradition of facile bullying. The small Scotch cousin was at first seen only in the light of a convenience. She was to be ignored, save for her few and rudimentary uses. But Eppie, at eight years old, when the Graingers first came, had an opposed and firmly established tradition. In her own domain, she was absolute ruler, and not for a moment did her conception of her supremacy waver. Her assurance was so complete that it left no room for painful struggle or dispute. From helpless stupor to a submission as helpless, the cousins fell by degrees to a not unhappy dependence. Eppie ran, climbed, played, as good a boy as either; and it was she who organized games, she who invented wonderful new adventures, all illumined by thrilling recitatives while in progress, she who, though their ally, and a friendly one, was the brains of the alliance, and, as thinker, dominated. Brains, at their age, being rudimentary in the young male, Eppie had some ground for her consciousness of kindly disdain. She regarded Jim and Clarence as an animated form of toy, more amusing than other toys because of possibilities of unruliness, or as a mere audience, significant only as a means for adding to the zest of life. Clarence, the younger, even from the first dumb days of reconstruction, was the more malleable. He was formed for the part of dazzled subjection to a strong and splendid despotism. Eppie treated her subject races to plenty of pomp and glory. Clarence listened, tranced, to her heroic stories, followed her leadership with docile, eager fidelity, and finally, showing symptoms of extreme romanticism, declared himself forever in love with her. Eppie, like the ascendant race again, made prompt and shameless use of the avowed and very apparent weakness. She bartered rare and difficult favors for acts of service, and on one occasion—a patch of purple in young Clarence’s maudlin days—submitted, with a stony grimace, to being kissed; for this treasure Clarence paid by stealing down to the forbidden public-house and there buying a bottle of beer which Eppie and Jim were to consume as robbers in a cave,—Clarence the seized and despoiled traveler. Eppie was made rather ill by her share of the beer, but, standing in a bed-gown at her window, she called to her cousins, in the garden below, such cheerful accounts of her malady, the slight chastisement that Aunt Rachel had inflicted, and her deft evasion of medicines, that her luster was heightened rather than dimmed by the disaster. Jim never owned, for a moment, to there being any luster. He was a square-faced boy, with abrupt nose, and lips funnily turning up at the corners, yet funnily grim,—most unsmiling of lips. He followed Eppie’s lead with the half-surly look of a slave in bondage, and seemed dumbly to recognize that his own unfitness rather than Eppie’s right gave her authority. He retaliated on Clarence for his sense of subjection and cruelly teased and scoffed at him. Clarence, when pushed too far, would appeal to Eppie for protection, and on these occasions, even while she sheltered him, a strange understanding seemed to pass between her and the tormentor as though, with him, she found Clarence ludicrous. Jim, before her stinging reproofs, would stand tongue-tied and furious, but, while she stung him, Eppie liked the sullen culprit better than the suppliant victim.

II

HEN Eppie was ten years old, she heard one day that a boy, a new boy, was coming to spend the spring and summer—a boy from India, Gavan Palairet. His mother and her own had been dear friends, and his father, as hers had been, was in the army; and these points of contact mitigated for Eppie the sense of exotic strangeness.

Eppie gathered that a cloud rested upon Mrs. Palairet, and the boy, though exotic, seemed to come from the far, brilliant country with his mother’s cloud about him.

“Ah, poor Fanny!” the general sighed over the letter he read at the breakfast-table. “How did she come to marry that brute! It will be a heart-breaking thing for her to send the boy from her.”

Eppie, listening with keen interest, gathered further, from the reminiscent talk that went on between the sisters and brother, that Mrs. Palairet, for some years of her boy’s babyhood, lived in England; then it had been India and the effort to keep him near her in the hills, and now his delicacy and the definite necessity of schooling had braced her to the parting. The general said, glancing with fond pride at his niece, that Eppie would be a fine playmate for him and would be of great service in cheering him before his plunge into school. Fanny had begged for much gentleness and affection for him. Apparently the boy was as heartbroken as she.

Eppie had very little diffidence about her own powers as either playmate or cheerer: she was well accustomed to both parts; but her eagerness to sustain and amuse the invalid was touched with a little shyness. The sad boy from India—her heart and mind rushed out in a hundred plans of welcome and consolation; but she suspected that a sad boy from India would require subtler