At the “big white house” Paul was a welcome and frequent visitor, but not upon the old footing. His lessons were done with. He had no time for them, but more than that he had assumed, with his responsibility as a man, a man’s attitude toward life and a man’s manners. For some weeks Peg openly resented this new rôle of Paul’s, ridiculing it as a thing “put on,” a mere pose. But the boy’s gravity and gentleness, his preoccupation in his work and his constant association with her father and the men effectually shut Peg out from his life. She found before the summer was over that the fourteen-year-old boy had in a single day become a man, and a man to whom she had become a mere child. She had lost a playmate and had not yet acquired a friend. But if she had lost one playmate she gained another, in the little blind Tanna, who in great measure helped her to endure her loss and to overcome her resentment. Through the long summer days Peg found in the little girl a new and altogether delightful interest. After much persuasion on Peg’s part and after approval by Paul, the little girl was allowed by her mother to mount old Tubby’s back behind old Tubby’s mistress and to take many a sober jaunt hither and thither along the quiet trails. Those were golden days for Peg, when Paul could make it chime with his work to join them in their jaunts or to meet them at a convenient rendezvous and share their lunch. With Paul, his very shadow everywhere, went Peter, a silent, dour, devoted henchman, rejoicing to fetch and carry for his chief. The mother, thus left much alone with her grief, withdrew more and more from the life of the household. Like a dark shadow she glided about the house, rarely speaking except to her little blind child, and spending most of her days in the woods near to the enclosed plot on the pine-shadowed hillside where was the new-made grave beside the two others, which held all that had made life for her vivid with love and gladness. Except when spoken to by Paul her face was masked by the passionless colour of the dead. Paul alone could kindle a flicker of light in her sombre eyes and set tremulous life waves rippling over her face. Often she would be found by Paul, wearing her Indian dress and roaming the woods, ostensibly seeking for roots and herbs for medicinal use. It seemed as if her loneliness and grief were driving her away from the newer environment of the white men’s civilisation and back to the ancient racial and primeval precincts of her own people.