Grif got in beside him, but his action was marked by that strange docility which the doctor did not care to see, for he could not help feeling that any other suggestion he might have made would have been followed in exactly the same way. In the doctor’s eyes such amenability too nearly resembled apathy. They drove in silence, and as the little boy sat there beside him, bare-headed and bare-kneed, Doctor O’Neill was struck anew by that peculiar expression of a kind of patient sweetness in his eyes, and by the lightness and slenderness of his body. It somehow touched him acutely, and he swore below his breath as he recalled Miss Annesley’s remarks about school. The doctor liked Grif. Since he had begun to look after him professionally he had even grown fond of him; but the interest he felt was very different from the interest he took in Palmer, and that difference seemed accounted for by the way Grif sat beside him now, sat there as quiet as a little mouse, not saying a word, but just nestling up to him confidingly. He felt really an affection for the little fellow, but his affection was mingled with, if not based on, pity, and the doctor was a man who naturally preferred those whom there was no need to pity. It was after he had paid his call, and when they were on their way home, that he said, “Why don’t you ever go to see Captain Batt and Miss Nancy now? They were asking me about you the other day, and saying you hadn’t been there for ever so long.” Grif coloured. “I’ll go and see them,” he answered softly. As a matter of fact, he felt rather guilty towards the Batts. He did not understand why it was that he should no longer be eager to go there; he even felt ashamed of his lack of enthusiasm; but some shadowy barrier seemed to have grown up between him and his friends. He had been conscious of it the last time he had gone. The place had not been the same, nothing had been the same; he had lost touch, he was a stranger there; and as he had wandered about, blind and baffled, turning this way and that in a fruitless endeavour to get back, he had known that it was useless. Something had happened; he had been cut off; he was like a dog who has lost a scent; and he had wanted to run away and be alone with the tears which kept rising to his eyes.... He had lost touch with everything now. All the things he used to care for were fast slipping from him――even their meaning. Sometimes, in a kind of reaction or despair, he would rush back into the past, enter feverishly into what the others were doing; but these reactions grew from day to day more feeble, and he seemed, like a sinking ship, to be settling down before the final plunge, that would carry him into the darkness and the cold.