‘I will tell you all, papa,’ said Eve suddenly, shaking her head, to shake off the temptation to be untrue. Her better nature had prevailed. ‘It was not a dream, it was a reality. I did see a pixy on the Raven Rock, the maddest, merriest, ugliest imp in the world.’ ‘We are surrounded by an unseen creation,’ said Mr. Jordan. ‘The microscope reveals to us teeming life in a drop of water. Another generation will use an instrument that will show them the air full of living things. Then the laugh will be no more heard on earth. Life will be grave, if not horrible. This generation is sadder than the last because less ignorant.’ ‘O papa! He was not a pixy at all. I have seen him before, when Mr. Jasper was thrown. Then he was perched like an ape, as he is, on the cross you set up, where my mother first appeared to you. He was making screams with his fiddle.’ Mr. Jordan looked at her with flickering, frightened eyes. ‘It was a spirit—the horse saw it and started—that was how Jasper was thrown,’ he said gravely. ‘Here Jasper comes,’ said Eve, laughing; ‘ask him.’ But instead of waiting for her father to do this, she sprang up, and danced to meet him with the simplicity of a child, and clapping her palms, she asked, ‘Mr. Jasper! My father will have it that my funny little pixy was a spirit of the woods or wold, and will not believe that he is flesh and blood.’ ‘My daughter,’ said Mr. Jordan, ‘has told me a strange story. She says that she saw a boy on the—the Raven Rock, and that you know him.’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Whence comes he?’ ‘That I cannot say.’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘Nowhere.’ ‘Is he here still?’ ‘I do not know.’ ‘Have you seen him before?’ ‘Yes—often.’ ‘That will do.’ Mr. Jordan jerked his head and waved his hand, in sign that he did not wish Jasper to remain. He treated Jasper with rudeness; he resented the loss of Eve’s money, and being a man of narrow mind and vindictive temper, he revenged the loss on the man who was partly to blame for the loss. He brooded over his misfortune, and was bitter. The sight of Jasper irritated him, and he did not scruple at meals to make allusions to the lost money which must hurt the young man’s feelings. When Barbara was present, she interposed to turn the conversation or blunt the significance of her father’s words. Eve, on the other hand, when Mr. Jordan spoke in a way she did not like to Jasper or Barbara, started up and left the room, because she could not endure discords. She sprang out of the way of harsh words as she turned from a brier. It did not occur to her to save others, she saved herself. Barbara thought of Jasper and her father, Eve only of herself. When Jasper was gone, Mr. Jordan put his hand to his head. ‘I do not understand, I cannot think,’ he said, with a vacant look in his eyes. ‘You say one thing, and he another.’ ‘Pardon me, dearest papa, we both say the same, that the pixy was nothing but a real boy of flesh and blood, but—there, let us think and talk of something else.’