At this point of the proceedings Mr. and Mrs. Penruddock had stepped into the breach. Eight years before they had lost their only child, a boy of three, and they now proposed to adopt little Bevis to fill up the empty gap in their household. They were kind, homely people, without much education, but thoroughly respected in the village, and everybody at once agreed that their offer solved the difficult problem. To save the child from the stigma of being brought up at the Union was everything. Even the poorest fisherman's home would have been preferable to that. So little Bevis, with the approval of the whole of Chagmouth, was formally adopted and transferred to Grimbal's Farm, where he grew apace and learnt to call Mr. and Mrs. Penruddock Father and Mother. If gossiping tongues could only have kept silent he might have continued to believe they were his parents, but one day, when he was about seven years old, he came back from school crying as if his heart was broken. Some of the boys had teased him and told him the story, with several exaggerations, of how he had been left at the "King's Arms" and never claimed. Mrs. Penruddock comforted him as best she could, but she acknowledged to her neighbours that he was never the same child afterwards. The knowledge had shattered his Paradise. He was a very proud, sensitive boy, and the taunts of his schoolfellows rankled. Henceforward he felt a sense of difference between himself and other children. He was quick to catch any allusions to his position, and a word or a glance was enough to bring the colour flooding into his cheeks. He fought many battles at school on this score, for he was hot tempered as well as proud, and for a year or two he was somewhat of an Ishmael, shunning his companions and hurrying home to the haven of Grimbal's Farm directly lessons were over. Then the fates, who seemed to use the boy as a shuttlecock, brought him an unexpected turn of good fortune. A lady, who was a summer visitor at the farm, took an interest in him, and was much touched by the romance of his story. She was well off, and she offered to pay for his education at a high-class school. So Bevis went as a boarder to Shelton College, where nobody knew anything about his antecedents, and he held his own among other boys, and only came back to Grimbal's Farm for holidays, and grew up so different from the fisher children of Chagmouth that he was less inclined than ever to make friends with them, and was a source of much gratification to Mr. and Mrs. Penruddock, who marvelled at his learning and his manners, and were as proud of him as a pair of robins who have hatched a young cuckoo.