Eppie asked if Captain Palairet were very horrid and was told that he was, with the warning that no intimation of such knowledge on her part was to be given to her new playmate; a warning that Eppie received with some indignation. No one, she was sure, could feel for Gavan as she did, or know so well what to say and what not to say to him. She was gratified to hear that he was not to go down to dinner but was to share the school-room high-tea with her and Miss Grimsby. But in the wide school-room, ruddy with the hues of sunset and hung with its maps and its childish decorations of Caldecott drawings and colored Christmas supplements from the “Graphic,”--little girls on stairs with dogs, and “Cherry Ripe,”--he was almost oppressively out of place. Not that he seemed to find himself so. He made, evidently, no claims to maturity. But Eppie felt a strange sense of shrunken importance as she listened to him politely answering Miss Grimsby’s questions about his voyage and giving her all sorts of information about religious sects in India. She saw herself relegated to a humbler rôle than any she had conceived possible for herself. She would be lucky if she succeeded in cheering at all this remote person; it was doubtful if she could ever come near enough to console. She took this first blow to her self-assurance very wholesomely. Her interest in the sad boy was all the keener for it. She led him, next morning, about the garden, over a bit of the moor, and into the fairyland of the birch-woods--their young green all tremulous in the wind and sunlight. And she showed him, among the pines and heather, the winding path, its white, sandy soil laced with black tree-roots, that led to the hilltop. “When you are quite rested, we will go up there, if you like,” she said. “The burn runs beside this path almost all the way--you can’t think how pretty it is; and when you get to the top you can see for miles and miles all about, all over the moors, and the hills, away beyond there, and you can see two villages besides ours, and such a beautiful windmill.” Gavan, hardly noticing the kind little girl, except to know that she was kind, assented to all her projects, indifferent to them and to her. A day or two after his arrival, he and Eppie were united in ministering to the dying lemur. The sad creature lay curled up in its basket, motionless, refusing food, only from time to time stretching out a languid little hand to its master; and when Gavan took it, the delicate animal miniature lay inert in his. Its eyes, seeming to grow larger and brighter as life went, had a strange look of question and wonder.