And at this Gavan said, with a smile that protested against any idea that he should not find her so: “I’m only afraid that I’m not good company for any one. She is a dear little girl.”
It was in the wanderings over the moors and in the birch-woods and up the hillside, where Eppie took him to see her views, that the bond really drew to closeness. Here nature and little Eppie seemed together to thaw him, to heal him, to make him unconsciously happy. A fugitive color dawned in his wasted cheeks; a fragile gaiety came to his manner. He began to find it easy to talk, easy to be quite a little boy. And once he did talk, Gavan talked a great deal, quickly, with a sort of nervous eagerness. There grew, in Eppie’s mind, a vast mirage-like picture of the strange land he came from: the great mountains about their high summer home; the blue-shadowed verandas; the flowers he and his mother grew in the garden; the rides at dawn; the long, hot days; the gentle, softly moving servants, some of whom he loved and told her a great deal about. Then the crowds, the swarming colors of the bazaars in the great cities.
“No, no; don’t wish to go there,” he said, taking his swift, light strides through the heather, his head bent, his eyes looking before him--he seldom looked at one, glanced only; “I hate it,--more than you do church!” and though his simile was humorous he didn’t laugh with it. “I hate the thought of any one I care about being there.” He had still, for Eppie, his mystery, and she dimly felt, too, that his greater ease with her made more apparent his underlying sadness; but the sense of being an outsider was gone, and she glowed now at the implication that she was one he cared about.
“It’s vast and meaningless,” said Gavan, who often used terms curiously unboyish. “I can’t describe it to you. It’s like a dream; you expect all the time to wake up and find nothing.”
“I know that I should never love anything so much as Scotland--as heather and pines and sky with clouds. Still, I should like to see India. I should like to see everything that there is to be seen--if I could be sure of always coming back here.”
“I shall always live here, Gavan,” said Eppie, feeling the skepticism of his “if.”