methods than those sufficing for a Jim or a Clarence. From the first moment of hearing about him she had felt, as if instinctively, that he would not be at all like Jim and Clarence.

He came on a still, sunny spring day. The general went to meet him at the station, and while he was gone Eppie made excitement endurable by vigorous action. Again and again she visited the fresh little room overlooking the hills, the garden, the pine-tree boughs, standing in a thoughtful surveyal of its beauties and comforts or darting off to add to them. She herself chose the delightful piece of green soap from the store-cupboard and the books for the table; and she gathered the daffodils in the birch-woods, filling every vase with them, so that the little room with its white walls and hangings of white dimity seemed lighted by clusters of pale, bright flames.

When the old fly rumbled at last through the gates and around the drive, Miss Rachel and Miss Barbara were in the doorway, and Eppie stood before them on the broad stone step, Robbie beside her.

Eppie was a lithe, sturdy, broad-shouldered child, with russet, sun-streaked hair, dark yet radiant, falling to her waist. She had a pale, freckled face and the woodland eyes of a gay, deep-hearted dog. To-day she wore a straight white frock, and her hair, her frock, dazzled with sunlight. No more invigorating figure could have greeted a jaded traveler.

That it was a very jaded traveler she saw at once, while the general bundled out of the fly and handed rugs, dressing-cases, and cages to the maid, making a passage for Gavan’s descent. The boy followed him, casting anxious glances at the cages, and Eppie’s eyes, following his, saw tropical birds in one and in the other a quaint, pathetic little beast—a lemur-like monkey swaddled in flannel and motionless with fear. Its quick, shining eyes met hers for a moment, and she looked away from them with a sense of pity and repulsion.

Gavan, as he ascended the steps, looked at once weary, frightened, and composed. He had a white, thin face and thick black hair—the sort of face and hair, Eppie thought, that the wandering prince of one of her own stories, the prince who understood the rooks’ secrets, would have. He was dressed in a long gray traveling-cloak with capes. The eager welcome she had in readiness for him seemed out of place before his gentle air of self-possession, going as it did with the look of almost painful shrinking. She was a little at a loss and so were the aunts, as she saw. They took his hand in turn, they smiled, they murmured vague words of kindness; but they did not venture to kiss him. He did not seem as little a boy as they had expected. The same expression of restraint was on Uncle Nigel’s hearty countenance. The sad boy was frozen and he chilled others.

He was among them now, in the hall, his cages and rugs and boxes about him, and, with all the cheery bustling to and fro, he must feel himself dreadfully alone. Eppie, too, was chilled and knew, indeed, the childish, panic impulse to run away, but her imagination of his loneliness was so strong as to nerve quite another impulse. Once she saw him as so desolate she could not hesitate. With resolute gravity she took his hand, saying, “I am so glad that you have come, Gavan,” and, as resolutely and as gravely, she kissed him on the cheek. He flushed so deeply that for a moment all her panic came back with the fear that she had wounded his pride; but in a moment he said, glancing at her, “You are very kind. I am glad to be here, too.”

His pride was not at all wounded. Eppie felt that at all events the worst of the ice was broken.

“May I feed your animals for you while you rest?” she asked him, as, with Aunt Barbara, they went up-stairs to his room. Gavan carried the lemur himself. Eppie had the birds in their cage.

“Thanks, so much. It only takes a moment; I can do it. My monkey would be afraid of any one else,” he answered, adding, “The journey has been too much for him; he has been very strange all day.”

“He will soon get well here,” said Eppie, encouragingly—“this is such a healthy place. But Scotland will be a great change from India for him, won’t it?”

“Very great. I am afraid he is going to be ill.” And again Gavan’s eye turned its look of weary anxiety upon the lemur.

But his anxiety did not make him forget his courtesy. “What a beautiful view,” he said, when they reached his room, “and what beautiful flowers!”

“I have this view, too,” said Eppie. “The school-room has the view of the moor; but I like this best, for early morning when one gets up. You will see how lovely it is to smell the pine-tree when it is all wet with dew.”

Gavan agreed that it must be lovely, and looked out with her at the blue-green boughs; but even while he looked and admired, she felt more courtesy than interest.

They left him in his room to rest till tea-time, and in the library Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara exclaimed over his air of fragility.

“He is fearfully tired, poor little fellow,” said the general; “a day or two of rest will set him up.”

“He looks a very intelligent boy, Nigel,” said Miss Rachel, “but not a cheerful disposition.”

“How could one expect that from him now, poor, dear child!” Aunt Barbara expostulated. “He has a beautiful nature, I am sure—such a sensitive mouth and such fine eyes.”

And the general said: “He is wonderfully like his mother. I am glad to see that he takes after Claude Palairet in nothing.”

Eppie asked if Captain Palairet were very horrid and was told that he was, with the warning that no intimation of such knowledge on her part was to be given to her new playmate; a warning that Eppie received with some indignation. No one, she was sure, could feel for Gavan as she did, or know so well what to say and what not to say to him.

She was gratified to hear that he was not to go down to dinner but was to share the school-room high-tea with her and Miss Grimsby. But in the wide school-room, ruddy with the hues of sunset and hung with its maps and its childish decorations of Caldecott drawings and colored Christmas supplements from the “Graphic,”—little girls on stairs with dogs, and “Cherry Ripe,”—he was almost oppressively out of place. Not that he seemed to find himself so. He made, evidently, no claims to maturity. But Eppie felt a strange sense of shrunken importance as she listened to him politely answering Miss Grimsby’s questions about his voyage and giving her all sorts of information about religious sects in India. She saw herself relegated to a humbler rôle than any she had conceived possible for herself. She would be lucky if she succeeded in cheering at all this remote person; it was doubtful if she could ever come near enough to console. She took this first blow to her self-assurance very wholesomely. Her interest in the sad boy was all the keener for it. She led him, next morning, about the garden, over a bit of the moor, and into the fairyland of the birch-woods—their young green all tremulous in the wind and sunlight. And she showed him, among the pines and heather, the winding path, its white, sandy soil laced with black tree-roots, that led to the hilltop. “When you are quite rested, we will go up there, if you like,” she said. “The burn runs beside this path almost all the way—you can’t think how pretty it is; and when you get to the top you can see for miles and miles all about, all over the moors, and the hills, away beyond there, and you can see two villages besides ours, and such a beautiful windmill.”

Gavan, hardly noticing the kind little girl, except to know that she was kind, assented to all her projects, indifferent to them and to her.

A day or two after his arrival, he and Eppie were united in ministering to the dying lemur. The sad creature lay curled up in its basket, motionless, refusing