was a square-faced boy, with abrupt nose, and lips funnily turning up at the corners, yet funnily grim,--most unsmiling of lips. He followed Eppie’s lead with the half-surly look of a slave in bondage, and seemed dumbly to recognize that his own unfitness rather than Eppie’s right gave her authority. He retaliated on Clarence for his sense of subjection and cruelly teased and scoffed at him. Clarence, when pushed too far, would appeal to Eppie for protection, and on these occasions, even while she sheltered him, a strange understanding seemed to pass between her and the tormentor as though, with him, she found Clarence ludicrous. Jim, before her stinging reproofs, would stand tongue-tied and furious, but, while she stung him, Eppie liked the sullen culprit better than the suppliant victim. II When Eppie was ten years old, she heard one day that a boy, a new boy, was coming to spend the spring and summer--a boy from India, Gavan Palairet. His mother and her own had been dear friends, and his father, as hers had been, was in the army; and these points of contact mitigated for Eppie the sense of exotic strangeness. Eppie gathered that a cloud rested upon Mrs. Palairet, and the boy, though exotic, seemed to come from the far, brilliant country with his mother’s cloud about him. “Ah, poor Fanny!” the general sighed over the letter he read at the breakfast-table. “How did she come to marry that brute! It will be a heart-breaking thing for her to send the boy from her.” Eppie, listening with keen interest, gathered further, from the reminiscent talk that went on between the sisters and brother, that Mrs. Palairet, for some years of her boy’s babyhood, lived in England; then it had been India and the effort to keep him near her in the hills, and now his delicacy and the definite necessity of schooling had braced her to the parting. The general said, glancing with fond pride at his niece, that Eppie would be a fine playmate for him and would be of great service in cheering him before his plunge into school. Fanny had begged for much gentleness and affection for him. Apparently the boy was as heartbroken as she. Eppie had very little diffidence about her own powers as either playmate or cheerer: she was well accustomed to both parts; but her eagerness to sustain and amuse the invalid was touched with a little shyness. The sad boy from India--her heart and mind rushed out in a hundred plans of welcome and consolation; but she suspected that a sad boy from India would require subtler methods than those sufficing for a Jim or a Clarence. From the first moment of hearing about him she had felt, as if instinctively, that he would not be at all like Jim and Clarence.