She rose, thrusting her hands into alternate pockets looking for a note-book, which she found and consulted. “I’m off for the fray, Uncle Nigel, for hatred and strife. You and Gavan are going to shoot, so I’ll bring you your lunch at the corner of the Carlowrie woods.” “So that you and Gavan may continue your quarrel there. Very well. I prefer listening.” “Gavan understands that Eppie must not be taken seriously,” Miss Barbara interposed; but Eppie rejoined, drawing on her gloves, “Indeed, I intend to be taken seriously. I quarrel with people I like as well as with those I hate.” “You are going to be a factor in my development, too?” said Gavan. “Of course, as you are in mine, as we all are in one another’s. We can’t help that. And my attack on you shall be conscious.” These open threats didn’t at all alarm him. It was what was unconscious in her that stirred disquiet. When Eppie had departed and the general had gone off to see to preparations for the morning’s shoot, Miss Barbara, still sitting rather wistfully behind her urn, said: “I hope, dear Gavan, that you will be able to influence Eppie a little. I am so thankful to find you unchanged about all the deeper things of life. You could help her, I am sure. She needs guidance. She is so loving, so clever, a joy to Nigel and to me; but she is very headstrong, very reckless and wilful,--a will in subjection to nothing but her own sense of right. It’s not that she is altogether irreligious,--thank Heaven for that,--but she hasn’t any of the happiness of religion. There is no happiness, is there, Gavan--I feel sure that you see it as I do,--but in having our lives stayed on the Eternal?” Gavan, as it was very easy to do, assented again. He spent the morning with the general in shooting over the rather scant covers, and at two, in a sheltered bend of the woods, where the sunlight lay still and bright, Eppie joined them, bringing the lunch-basket in her dog-cart. She was in a very good humor, and while, sitting above them, she dispensed rations, announced to her uncle the result of her visit to Sir Alec. “He thinks he can turn him out if any flagrant ease of drunkenness occurs again. We talked over the conditions of his lease.” “Carston, I am sure, doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about it.” “Of course not; but he cares that I care.” “You see, Gavan, by what strings the world is pulled. Carston hasn’t two ideas in his head.”