“You always know which their window is,” Arnold told Eddy as they turned into the square, “by the things on the sill. They put the food and drink there, to keep cool, or be out of the way, or something.” Looking up, they saw outside an upper window a blue jug and a white bowl, keeping cool in the moonlight. As they rang at the door, the window was pushed up, and hands reached out to take the jug and bowl in. A cheerful face looked down at the tops of their heads, and a cheerful voice said clearly, “They’ve come, Jane. They’re very early, aren’t they? They’ll have to help buttering the eggs.” Arnold called up, “If you would prefer it, we will walk round the square till the eggs are buttered.” “Oh, no, please. We’d like you to come up and help, if you don’t mind.” The voice was a little doubtful because of Eddy, the unknown quantity. The door was opened by an aged door-keeper, and they climbed breathlessly steep stairs to the room. In the room was the smell of eggs buttering over a spirit-lamp, and of cocoa boiling over a fire. There was also a supper-table, laid with cups and plates and oranges and butter and honey, and brown, green-wainscotted walls, and various sorts of pictures hanging on them, and various sorts of pots and jugs from various sorts of places, such as Spain, New Brighton, and Bruges, and bronze chrysanthemums in jars, and white shoots of bulbs pricking up out of cocoa-nut fibre in bowls, and a book-case with books in it, and a table in a corner littered with book-binding plant, and two girls cooking. One of them was soft and round like a puppy, and had fluffy golden hair and a cornflower-blue pinafore to match cornflower-blue eyes. The other was small, and had a pale, pointed face and a large forehead and brown hair waving back from it, and a smile of wonderfully appealing sweetness, and a small, gentle voice. She looked somehow as if she had lived in a wood, and had intimately and affectionately known all the little live wild things in it, both birds and beasts and flowers: a queer unearthliness there was about her, that suggested the morning winds and the evening stars. Eddy, who knew some of her drawings, had noted that chaste, elfin quality in them; he was rather pleased to find it meet him so obviously in her face and bearing. Seeing the two girls, he was disposed to echo James Peters’ comment, “Can’t think how she and Sally made friends,” and to set it down tritely to that law of contrasts which some people, in the teeth of experience, appear to believe in as the best basis of friendship.