‘I am Italian,’ he would say when Mr. Pepperdine slyly teased him. ‘It does not matter that I was born in England. My real name is Luciano Damerelli, and my father’s, if he had used it, was Cypriano.’ Little by little they began to find out the boy’s qualities and characteristics. He was strangely old-fashioned, precocious, and unnaturally grave, and cared little for the society of other children, at whom he had a trick of staring as if they had been insects impaled beneath a microscope and he a scientist examining them. He appeared to have two great passions--one for out-door life and nature; the other for reading. He would sit for hours on the bridge watching the river run by, or lie on his back on the lawn in front of the house staring at the drifting clouds. He knew every nook of the ruinous part of the castle and every corner of the old church before he had been at Simonstower many weeks. He made friends with everybody in the village, and if he found out that an old man had some strange legend to tell, he pestered the life out of him until it was told. And every day he did so much reading, always with the stern concentration of the student who means to possess a full mind. When Lucian had been nearly two months at the farm it was borne in upon Miss Pepperdine’s mind that he ought to be sent to school. She was by no means anxious to get rid of him--on the contrary she was glad to have him in the house: she loved to hear him talk, to see him going about, and to watch his various proceedings. But Keziah Pepperdine had been endowed at birth with the desire to manage--she was one of those people who are never happy unless they are controlling, devising, or superintending. Moreover, she possessed a very strict sense of justice--she believed in doing one’s duty, especially to those people to whom duty was owing, and who could not extract it for themselves. It seemed to her that it was the plain duty of Lucian’s relatives to send Lucian to school. She was full of anxieties for his future. Every attempt which she had made to get her brother to tell her anything about the boy’s affairs had resulted in sheer failure--Simpson Pepperdine, celebrated from the North Sea to the Westmoreland border as the easiest-going and best-natured man that ever lived, was a past master in the art of evading direct questions. Keziah could get no information from him, and she was anxious for Lucian’s sake. The boy, she said, ought to be fitted out for some walk in life. She took the vicar into her confidence, seizing the opportunity when he called one day and found no one but herself at home.