Yet Mause was fond of Elsa, and in her heart of hearts Elsa loved Mause. She would far sooner have gone without her own meals than have omitted the plate of broken biscuit and bones that she carried twice daily to the kennel. Every day she filled the dog’s tin with fresh water, and she brushed the thick, shaggy coat as religiously and even more vigorously than she brushed Mr. Wycherly’s clothes. It grieved her rather that the latter, like Mause, wore the same coat week-days and Sundays. Mause was meekness and gentleness itself with the dwellers at Remote, but outsiders gave her a very different character, and the Reverend Peter Gloag even went so far as to remonstrate with Miss Esperance for keeping such a savage brute about the place. Not that Mause had ever actually bitten even a man selling sewing-machines, but she had a way of barking and bouncing, of growling and gyrating at the full length of her chain, that was decidedly alarming; and if she happened to be loose, her swift rush to the gate at the sound of a strange foot-step was disconcerting in the extreme. What would she say to the children? "If she’s ill-natured with them, she’ll have to go, poor beastie," Miss Esperance had said, as they drove from the station with the two tired, cross, little boys on that first day. "She’s a dear, faithful animal, but I could not let such wee things be frightened." However, the fears of Miss Esperance were groundless. From the first moment that she beheld the little boys, Mause took them under her protection. Perhaps it was that neither of the children showed the slightest fear of the great, clumsy, shaggy beast, but greeted her with joyful outcries, instantly demanding her release from that harassing chain. The right kind of dog and the right kind of child are friends always, by some immutable, inscrutable law of attraction. It seemed almost as if Mause mistook Montagu and Edmund for the puppies which had been her pride some five years before. And the baby certainly did his very best to confirm her in her mistake. Like a puppy, he had a fondness for carrying off numerous and inconceivably incongruous articles from places where they ought to be to distant parts of the garden, where he would be found surrounded by a selection of improvised playthings, while Mause sat by regarding the work of destruction with her tongue hanging out, and an expression of maternal pride upon her broad and blurry countenance. When the children played in the garden their first thought was that Mause must play too. "She must be very lonely in that little wooden house," Montagu said pleadingly. "She would be so happy with us, and we do want her so." And Edmund roared and refused to be comforted unless his "big bow-wow" might go with him whenever Robina took him out in his perambulator.