“It must be nearly four years since the boy’s death,” the canon murmured, trying to recall the date. “He was just about Grif’s age.” “Grif dear, if you’ve finished your supper I think you had better say good night.” To Grif the conversation had begun to be intensely interesting, nevertheless, at Aunt Caroline’s words, he got up immediately. “How good he is,” she remarked to Miss Johnson when he had gone, and Palmer, Edward, and Barbara with him. “I don’t think I ever knew a more docile child.” “Y――es,” Miss Johnson agreed unenthusiastically. “It doesn’t make him any easier to look after, unfortunately.” “You are thinking about his staying out so long? After all, it wasn’t very serious, was it? I don’t think we need bother ourselves about him another time: he seems to have the gift of making friends.” But Miss Johnson was not so sanguine. “I’m thinking of lots of things,” she replied. “I’d rather be in charge of all the others put together than of Grif. One at least knows where one is with them. And I’m not sure that he’s always perfectly truthful.” She regretted these last words as soon as they were spoken, but, even if they were an exaggeration of what she felt, it was perhaps just as well to put Miss Annesley upon her guard. “How do you mean?” asked Aunt Caroline, in surprise. “I can hardly believe he is _un_truthful. He certainly doesn’t look it. He’s got as honest a pair of eyes as any little boy I ever saw.” “I don’t mean, of course, that he would tell a downright lie,” the governess hastened to explain. “But his accounts of where he has been, and of what he has been doing, and――things like that――are sometimes very unsatisfactory. And the friends he makes are _not_ always desirable. He once went away for a whole day with an Italian organ-grinder. Fortunately the man turned out to be less disreputable than might have been expected, and brought him back in the evening safe and sound. I gave him a piece of my mind as he stood on the doorstep grinning and bowing like a monkey. I told him he might consider himself lucky that I hadn’t called in the police. And after I had done Grif actually shook hands with him, and thanked him for the pleasant day he had had, and apologized for what _I_ had said. As for giving an account of what he had been doing or where he had been, he simply produced a farrago of nonsense like some story in the _Arabian Nights_.” “Don’t you think it is a mistake to expect children to be perfectly literal. He was probably very much excited, and mixed up some of the things he wanted to see with what he _had_ seen.” Miss Johnson did not argue the point, but she had an idea that before the end of her visit she should be able to bring out triumphantly that popular phrase, ‘I told you so.’ CHAPTER VIII GREY WEATHER ‘With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.’ ――_Shakespeare._