Alice herself did not appear to resent my coldness; she hung on to my arm and laughed up at me as if we were the oldest friends in the world. She was a strange, elf-like child, with a pale face and big black eyes that were not hard like her mother’s. She looked as if she had been allowed all her life to sit up too late. She was small for her age, and extraordinarily fragile; she was like a little figure cut out of a Sime drawing. Meanwhile Uncle George, who had been out in the rain, and had removed his boots, was sitting before the gas-stove, presenting the soles of two large, gray-socked feet to the red bars. A light steam began to rise from them, and Uncle George declared that his new boots must “let in,” and that he had a good mind to take them back to the man he had bought them from, and that it was too bad. I sat down near him and talked to him, while I watched the steam float up from his feet. Aunt Margaret was getting tea ready in another room, and little Alice hovered behind my chair. Every now and again she leaned over the back of it and said something. She brought a book to show me, and while I looked at it she put her arms round my neck and kissed my cheek. “Run away, Alice, and quit bothering Peter,” said Uncle George. “It’s queer the way she’s taken to you,” he added in a gratified whisper. “She’s usually that shy you couldn’t coax her out of a corner!” Alice retreated, but almost immediately came back, and again put her arms round me. She held her small white face close to mine and looked at me with her great black eyes and smiled. She gave me an impression of a little house haunted by queer and not altogether pleasant ghosts, and yet somehow I felt sorry for her, and I stroked her thin hand that rested on my sleeve, delicate and light as a leaf. “You’re a lovely big boy,” she whispered in my ear, rubbing her face up and down against my jacket, as if it had been the fur of an animal. I couldn’t help laughing, and she cuddled close against me, her chin on my shoulder. “She must be awfully nervous,” I thought, for the thunderous approach of one of those hideous traction-engines, that I was soon to find were a feature of the town, made her tremble.