It was a remarkable thing that nobody except a few children and Mr Torrance the schoolmaster--for actually one schoolmaster frequented Abercorran House--liked to be alone with Aurelius. I never heard this spoken of, and I believe nobody consciously avoided being alone with him. Only, it so happened that he was welcomed by a company, but not one member of it was likely to stay on long if at last he found himself and Aurelius left behind by the others. Meeting him in the street, no one ever stopped for more than a few words with him. Some awkwardness was feared, but not in Aurelius, who was never awkward. Unsympathetic people called him a foreigner, and there was something in it. In no imaginable crowd could he have been one of the million “friends, Romans, countrymen!” Perhaps even at Abercorran House he was not quite one of us. Yet in a moment he was at home there. I can see him holding a pigeon--in the correct manner--spreading out one of its wings and letting it slip back again, while he was talking, as luck would have it, to Higgs the bird-chap who cared for nothing but pigeons. Higgs was so taken aback by the way the new-comer talked and held the bird--a man whom he would instinctively have laughed at--that he could not say a word, but escaped as soon as possible and blundered about saying: “I like the little chap.... You can see he’s used to birds--who would have thought it?--and I wondered what it was young Arthur was bringing in.” Higgs was so pleased with his own discernment, his cleverness in seeing good in that unlikely place, that he really exaggerated his liking for Aurelius. However, let it be set down to Higgs’ credit that he knew a hawk from a handsaw, and hailed Aurelius almost at first sight. As I have mentioned, Aurelius had asked me to take him to Abercorran House, because I had attracted his fancy with something I had said about the Morgans or the house. It was a lucky introduction. For all liked him, and he was soon free to stay at the house for a night or a month, at pleasure. It was one of his virtues to admire Jessie. He must have felt at once that she was alone among women, since he never knelt to her or made any of his long, lofty speeches to her as to other fair women whom he met elsewhere, as at my home. She saw his merit instantly. To please him she would go on and on singing for him “The Cuckoo,” “Midsummer Maid,” “Hob-y-deri-dando,” “Crockamy Daisy Kitty-alone.”