“Not a bit horrid, only very cold and polite.”
“I didn’t realize things much. You see—“ Gavan paused.
“Yes, of course; you weren’t thinking of us. You were thinking of—what you had left.”
“Yes,” he assented, not looking at her.
He went on presently, turning his eyes on her and smiling over a sort of alarm at his own advance to personalities: “You weren’t horrid. I remember that I thought you the nicest little girl I had ever seen. You were all that I did see—standing there in the sun, with a white dress like Alice in Wonderland and with your hair all shining. I never saw hair like it.”
“Do you think it pretty?” Eppie asked eagerly.
“Very—all those rivers of gold in the dark.”
“I am glad. I think it pretty, too, and nurse is afraid that I am vain, I think, for she always takes great pains to tell me that it is striped hair and that she hopes it may grow to be the same color when I’m older.”
“I hope not,” said Gavan, gallantly.
Many long afternoons were spent in the garden, where Eppie initiated him into the sanctities of the summer-house. Gavan’s sense of other people’s sanctities was wonderful. She would never have dreamed of showing her dolls to her cousins; but she brought them out and displayed them to Gavan, and he looked at them and their appurtenances carefully, gravely assenting to all the characteristics that she pointed out. So kind, indeed, so comprehending was he, that Eppie, a delightful project dawning in her mind, asked: “Have you ever played with dolls? I mean when you were very little?”