“Oh, Mavis, do not talk so sillily,” said Ruby; “his eyes aren’t a bit blue. She’s got blue on the brain, cousin, she really has. Seeing forget-me-nots in the sky too! I don’t think he was a particularly nice boy. He was rather cool. I’m sure we wouldn’t have done his grandfather any harm. Did you ever hear of him, cousin? Old Adam they call him;” and then she went on to give a rather more clear account of their walk, and all they had seen and heard.
Miss Hortensia listened attentively, and into her own eyes crept a dreamy, far-away, or rather long-ago look.
“It is odd,” she said; “I have a kind of fancy that I have heard of the old ‘solitary,’ for he must be almost a hermit, before. But somehow I don’t think it was here. I wonder how long he has lived here?”
“I don’t know,” said Ruby. “A good while, I should think. He was here when Joan was our nurse.”
“But that was only two years ago,” said Miss Hortensia, smiling. “If he had been here many years the people would not count him so much of a foreigner. And the boy you met—has he come to take care of the old man?”
“I suppose so. We didn’t ask him,” said Ruby carelessly. “He was really such a cool boy, ordering us not to go near the cottage indeed! I told him he might come up to get some soup or jelly for his grandfather,” she went on, with a toss of her head. “I said it, you know, just to put him in his place, and remind him whom he was speaking to.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to be rude,” said Mavis; “and, cousin, there really was something rather ‘fairy’ about him. Isn’t it very queer we never heard of that path before?”
“Yes,” Miss Hortensia replied. “Are you sure you didn’t both fall asleep on the shore and dream it all? Though, to be sure, it is rather too cold weather for you to have been overcome by drowsiness.”
“And we couldn’t both have dreamt the same thing if we had fallen asleep,” said Mavis, in her practical way. “It wasn’t like when you were a little girl and saw or dreamt—”
“Don’t you begin telling the story if cousin Hortensia’s going to tell it herself,” interrupted Ruby. “I was just thinking I had forgotten it a good deal, and that it would seem fresh. But here’s tea at last—I am so glad.”