It was Vi, grown older and a little bigger since the first time she came to the Hewan--a very stately, splendid, foolish, idle little person, full of laughter and gravity and baby fun and precocious wisdom. She was as fond of taking care of everybody as ever she had been, but she forgot herself oftener, being older, and was not perhaps quite so severe on peccadilloes as at six. She was a little alarmed when she saw the big thing struggling upward among the ferns, and wondered whether there might really be a bear or a wolf in the woods, as there used to be in ancient times. A lion it could not be, Violet reflected, for the weather was too cold in Scotland for lions. She did not like to run away, but she thanked Providence devoutly that none of “the children” were here, and wondered with a delightful thrill of excitement whether, if it should be a lion, it would do anything to her. Then there came a whistle which Violet knew, and looking down through the bushes with a pleasant sense of safety, she recognised the wayfarer. “Oh, is it you?” she cried, calling to him from the top of her fortress: “I thought it was a bear.” “Ay, it’s me. There are no bears nowadays. Who has come?” said Val, laconic and _sans cérémonie_, as is the use of children, as he panted upwards to the embankment, and putting his foot in a crevice swung himself up with the aid of a tree. “You will break your neck,” said little Vi, with great gravity; “how can you do such things, you foolish boys?--nobody has come but me.” “Nobody but you!” said Val, with a whistle of surprise and half regret. Then he added with animation, “I’m awfully hungry; give us some breakfast, Vi. I have run off from Grinder, and I don’t mean to go home till night. You can’t think how jolly it is in the woods when there’s nobody to stop you, and you have everything your own way.”