“Why, Moppet, are you tired of your new little friends?” he asked kindly.

“I don’t like children:  they are so silly,” answered Moppet, with decision.  “I like you much better.”

“Do you really, now!  I wonder how much you like me.  As well as you like junket?”

“Oh, what a silly question!  As if one could care for any nice thing to eat as well as one cares for a live person.”

“Couldn’t one!  I believe there are little boys in Boscastle who are fonder of plum-pudding than of all their relations.”

“They must be horrid little boys.  Laddie is greedy, but he is not so greedy as that.  I shouldn’t like to live in the same house with him if he were.”

“For fear he should turn cannibal and eat you?”

“What is a camomile, and does it really eat people?”

“Never mind, Moppet; there are none in our part of the world,” said Sir John, hastily, feeling that he had made a faux pas, and might set Moppet dreaming of cannibals if he explained their nature and attributes.

He had been warned by his friend Danby that Moppet was given to dreaming at night of anything that had moved her wonder or her fear in the day, and that she would awaken from such dreams in a cold perspiration, with wild eyes and clinched hands.  Her sleep had been haunted by goblins, and made hideous by men who had sold their shadows, and by wolves who were hungry for little girls in red cloaks.  It had been found perilous to tell her the old familiar fairy tales which most children have been told, and from which many children have suffered in the dim early years, before the restrictions of space and climate are understood, and wolves, bears, and lions located in their own peculiar latitudes.

Sir John looked down at the little dark head which was pressed so lovingly against his waistcoat, and at the long dark lashes that veiled the deep-set eyes.

“And so you really like me?” said he.

“I really love you; not so much as mother, but veway, veway much.”

“As much as Danby—­as Uncle Tom?”

“Better than Uncle Tom! but please don’t tell him so.  It might make him unhappy.”

“I dare say it would.  Uncle Tom has a jealous disposition.  He might shut you up in a brazen tower.”

Another faux pas.  Moppet would be dreaming of brazen towers.  Imagination, assisted by plum-pudding, would run readily into tormenting visions.

Happily, Moppet made no remark upon the tower.  She was thinking—­thinking deeply; and presently she looked up at Sir John with grave gray eyes and said:—­

“I believe I love you better than Uncle Tom, because you are a grander gentleman,” she said musingly, “and because you have this beautiful big house.  It is yours, isn’t it—­your veway, veway own?”

“My very, very own.  And so you like my house, Moppet?  And will you be sorry to go away?”