to the pavilion at Burnmore. With that the
phase of stirrings and intimations was over for ever in my life. All
those other impressions went then to the dusty lumber room from which I
now so slightingly disinter them.

Sec. 5

We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was
killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by
nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about
eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days,
and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, apparently on
account of some early linguistic efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his
best to avenge his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of
limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better
read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and
warfare and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When
the Christians were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four
months in the year there, I had a kind of standing invitation to be with
them. Sometimes there would also be two Christian cousins to swell our
party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a
detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but
these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not
greatly love them.

It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has
happened between us since lies between that and my present self like
some luminous impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was
taller than she was and thought her legs unreasonably thin, and that
once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an
Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at
me in a sudden fury, smacked my face, scratched me and had to be
suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united
manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I noted first the blazing
blueness of her eyes. She was light and very plucky, so that none of us
cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an eel.
But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was
transformed.

For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the
family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two;
Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in
Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then