"The winds," corrected Gratian, "the four winds."
"The four winds," repeated Fergus. "North, south, east, and west. They don't blow all together, do they?"
"I think they do sometimes. Yes, I know they do—at night I'm sure I've heard them all four together, like tones in music."
Fergus looked delighted.
"Ah, you have to come back to music, you see," he said. "There's nothing tells everything and explains everything as well as music."
"You must have thought about it a great deal," said Gratian admiringly. "I've only just begun to think about things, and I think it's very puzzling, though I'm older than you. I don't know if music would explain things to me."
"Perhaps not as much as to me," said Fergus. "You see it's been my best thing—ever since I was five years old I've been lying like this. At home the others are very kind, but they can't quite understand," he added, shaking his head a little sadly; "they can all run about and jump and play. And when children can do all that, they don't need to think much. Still it is very dull without them—that is why I begged mother to try to get me somebody to play with. But I think you're better than that, Gratian. I think you understand more—how is it? You've never been ill or had to lie still."
"No," said the boy, "but I've had no brothers and sisters to play with me. And perhaps it's with being born at Four Winds—mother says so herself."
"I daresay it is," said Fergus gravely.
"Won't you get better soon?" asked Gratian, looking at Fergus with profound sympathy. For, gentle as he was, the idea of having to lie still, not being able to run about on the moors and feel his dear winds on his face, having even to call to others to help him before he could get to the window and look out on the sunshine—it seemed perhaps more dreadful to Gratian than it would have done to an ordinary, healthy child like Tony Ferris. "Won't you too be able to walk and run about—even if it's only a little?"