The aunts spent year after year at Kirklands, with an infrequent trip to Edinburgh. Neither had been South since the death of the beloved younger sister. Uncle Nigel, the general, older than either, was russet-faced, white-haired, robust. He embodied a sound, well-nurtured type and brought to it hardly an individual variation. He taught his niece, re-read a few old books, followed current thought in the “Quarterly” and the “Scotsman,” and wrote his memoirs, that moved with difficulty from boyhood, so detailed were his recollections and so painstaking his recording of inessential fact. For their few neighbors, life went on as slowly as for the Carmichaels. The Carstons of Carlowrie House were in touch with a larger outside life: Sir Alec Carston was member for the county; but the inmates of Brechin House, Crail Hill, and Newton Lowry were fixtures. These dim personages hardly counted at all in young Eppie’s experience. She saw them gathered round the tea-table in the library when she was summoned to appear with tidy hair and fresh frock: stout, ruddy ladies in driving-gloves and boat-shaped hats; dry, thin young ladies in hard-looking muslins and with frizzed fringes; a solid laird or two. They were vague images in her world. People who really counted were the village people, and on the basis of her aunts’ charitable relationship Eppie built up for herself with most of them a tyrannous friendship. The village was over two miles away; one reached it by the main road that ran along the moor, past the birch-woods, the tiny loch, and then down a steep bit of hill to the handful of huddled gray roofs. There was the post-office, the sweet-shop with its dim, small panes, behind which, to Eppie’s imagination, the bull’s-eyes and toffee and Edinburgh rock looked, in their jars, like odd fish in an aquarium; there was the carpenter’s shop, the floor all heaped with scented shavings, through which one’s feet shuffled in delightful, dry rustlings; there the public-house, a lurid corner building, past which Miss Grimsby always hurried her over-interested young charge, and there the little inn where one ordered the dusty, lurching, capacious old fly that conveyed one to the station, five miles away. Eppie was far more in the village than her share of her aunts’ charities at all justified, and was often brought in disgrace from sheer truancy. The village babies, her dolls, and Robbie, her Aberdeen terrier, were the realities at once serious and radiant of life. She could do for them, love them as she would. Her uncle and aunts and the fond old nurse were included in an unquestioning tenderness, but they could not be brought under its laws, and their independence made them more remote.