ttle boy
of course could not consider, even though he suddenly wished it of all
things--for he had never kissed any one but his father and mother. He had
told Clytie it made him sick to be kissed. Now, when the little girl
called to him as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he could not
go. And then she stabbed him by falsely kissing the complacent Allan
standing by, who thereupon smirked in sickening deprecation and promptly
rubbed his cheek.

Not until the pair were out in the street did his man-strength come back
to him, and then he could only burn with indignation at her and at Allan.
He wondered that no one was shocked at him for feeling as he did. But, as
they seemed not to notice him, he rode his horse again. No mad gallop now,
but a slow, moody jog--a pace ripe for any pessimism.

"Clytie!" he called imperiously, after a little. "Do you think there's a
real bone in this horse--like a _regular_ horse?"

Clytie responded from the dining-room with a placid "I guess so."

"If I sawed into its neck, would the saw go right into a real _bone_?"

"My suz! what talk! Well?"

"I know there _ain't_ any bone in there, like a regular horse. It's just a
_wooden_ bone."

Nor was this his last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and
there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as
he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a
moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted
the sitting-room; there was sacrilege in her very grasp of it; and his
grandfather seemed hardly to know of its existence. The little girl who
had chosen the good name of Lillian May might have been excused; but not
these others. If his grandfather was without understanding in such a
matter, in what, then, could he be trusted?

He descended to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even
if he had _one_ of them, he would probably never have a whole row,
graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front
window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into
envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now
did, that on last Christmas he had received only one pretentious candy
rooster, falsely hollow, and a very uninteresting linen handkerchief
embroidered with some initials not his own. He fell asleep on a brutal
reflection that the cane could be broken accidentally and eaten.