ad said about my White People
made him feel that he must be abstracted sometimes and miss things. He
did not remember having noticed the rare fairness I had seen. He smiled
as he said it, because, of course, it was only a little thing--that he
had not seen that some people were so much fairer than others.

"But it has not been a little thing to you, evidently. That is why I
am even rather curious about it," he explained. "It is a difference
definite enough to make you speak almost as if they were of a different
race from ours."

I sat silent a few seconds, thinking it over. Suddenly I realized what I
had never realized before.

"Do you know," I said, as slowly as he himself had spoken, "I did not
know that was true until you put it into words. I am so used to thinking
of them as different, somehow, that I suppose I do feel as if they were
almost like another race, in a way. Perhaps one would feel like that
with a native Indian, or a Japanese."

"I dare say that is a good simile," he reflected. "Are they different
when you know them well?"

"I have never known one but Wee Brown Elspeth," I answered, thinking it
over.

He did start then, in the strangest way.

"What!" he exclaimed. "What did you say?"

I was quite startled myself. Suddenly he looked pale, and his breath
caught itself.

"I said Wee Elspeth, Wee Brown Elspeth. She was only a child who played
with me," I stammered, "when I was little."

He pulled himself together almost instantly, though the color did not
come back to his face at once and his voice was not steady for a few
seconds. But he laughed outright at himself.

"I beg your pardon," he apologized. "I have been ill and am rather
nervous. I thought you said something you could not possibly have
said. I almost frightened you. And you were only speaking of a little
playmate. Please go on."

"I was only going to say that she was fair like that, fairer than any
one I had ever seen; but when we played together she seemed like any
other child. She was the first I ever knew."

I told him about the misty day on the moor, and about the pale troopers
and the big, lean leader who carried Elspeth before him on his saddle. I
had never talked to any one about it before, not even to Jean Braidfute.
But he seemed to be so interested, as if the little story quite
fascinated him. It was only an episode, but it brought in the weirdness
of the moor and my childish fancies about the things hiding in the whit