little
boy when she permitted him to guard her from it, instead of running home
across the lawn when it was surely coming;--a loveliness he felt more
poignantly at certain reflective times when he was not also afraid. For,
the Gratcher being his own invention, these moments of superiority to its
terrors would inevitably seize him.

[Illustration: "She could be made to believe that only he could protect
her from the Gratcher."]

Better than protecting Nancy did he love to report the Gratcher's
immediate presence to Allan, daring him to stay on that spot until it put
its dreadful head around the corner and shook one of its crutches at them.
In low throbbing tones he would report its fearful approach, stride by
stride, on the crutches. This he could do by means of the Gratcher-eye,
with which he claimed to be endowed. One having a Gratcher-eye can see
around any corner when a Gratcher happens to be coming--yet only then, not
at any other time, as Allan had proved by experiment on the first
disclosure of this phenomenon. He of the Gratcher-eye could positively not
see around a corner, if, for example, Allan himself was there; the
Gratcher-eye could not tell if his hat was on his head or off. But this by
no means proved that the Gratcher-eye did not exercise its magic function
when a Gratcher actually approached, and Allan knew it. He would stand
staunchly, with a fine incredulity, while the little boy called off the
strides, perhaps, until he announced "_Now_ he's just passed the
well-curb--_now_ he's--" but here, scoffing over an anxious shoulder,
Allan would go in where Clytie was baking, feigning a sudden great hunger.

Nancy would stay, because she believed the little boy's protestations that
he could save her, and the little boy himself often believed them.

"I love Allan best, because he is so comfortable, but I think you are the
most admirable," she would say to him at such times; and he thought well
of her if she had seemed very, very frightened.

So life had become a hardy sport with him. No longer was he moved to wish
for early dissolution when Clytie's song floated to him:

"'I should like to die,' said Willie,
If my papa could die, too;
But he says he isn't ready,
'Cause he has so much to do!"

This Willie had once seemed sweet and noble to him, but the words now made
him avid of new life by reminding him that his own dear father would soon
come to be with him one week, as he had promised wh