‘Either she’s found me out and knows everything,’ thought Paul; ‘or she hasn’t found me out and knows nothing.’ But which it was, for the life of him, he couldn’t be certain. ‘Oh,’ she cried suddenly, looking up into his face, her eyes, to Paul’s utter amazement, wet with tears, ‘Oh! how Daddy must have loved you!’ And, before he could think of a word to say, she was gone! Gone into the woods with a fluttering as of white wings. ‘So apparently I am not too mixed up and educated for their exquisite little world,’ he reflected, as soon as the emotion caused by her last words had subsided a little; ‘and the things I know are not of the “stuffing” kind!’ It all made him think a good deal—this attitude the children adopted towards _his_ attitude, this unhesitating acceptance of him in spite of all his pretence. But he still valiantly maintained his studied aloofness of manner, and never allowed himself to overstep the danger line. He never forgot himself when he played with them, and the stories he told were just what they called “ornary” stories, and not tales of pure imagination and fantasy. The rules of the game, finely balanced, were observed between them just as between himself and Mrs. Tompkyns. Yet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour. CHAPTER IX All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.—_George MacDonald._ It was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mlle. Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild. The sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood. The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley, and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the grass and flowers. During the day there had been rain—warm showers alternating with dazzling sunshine as in April—and now the earth, before going to sleep, was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen enjoyment. The odour of burning wood floated to him over the tree-tops, hanging a little heavily in the moist atmosphere; he thought of a hundred fires of his own making—elsewhere, far away! ‘And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain,’ he murmured.