my place," Old Mat would say. "Billy Bluff
a-low and my little gal a-loft."

Boy loved to go to sleep to the sound of the rhythmical munching of the
horses beneath, and to wake to the noise of them blowing their noses in
the dawn. Never a mouse moved in the stable at night but she was aware
of it. And when a horse was training for a big event barely a night
passed but in the small hours a white, bare-footed figure issued from
the partition and came swiftly along the loft, disturbing rats and bats
as she came, to lift a trap-door and look down with guardian eye on the
hope of the stable dreaming unconsciously beneath.

In her solitary eyrie up there the girl learned a great deal.

Elsie Haggard, the vicar's daughter, or, as Mrs. Woodburn would say,
with that touch of satire characteristic of her, the daughter of the
vicar's wife, who was two years older than Boy, and at college, once
asked her if she wasn't afraid.

"Afraid!" asked the girl. "What of?"

"I don't know," answered Elsie. "It's so far from everybody."

"I like being alone," replied the girl. "And there are the horses."

Elsie Haggard shared her mother's concern for Boy Woodburn's soul.

"And Someone Else," she said.

"Yes," replied the girl simply, almost brutally. "There's the Lord."

Elsie Haggard looked at her sharply, suspecting her of flippancy.

Nothing clearly was further from the girl's mind. Her face was unusually
soft, almost dreamy.

"Wherever there are horses and dogs and creatures He is, don't you
think?" she said, quite unconscious that she was quoting inexactly a
recently discovered saying dear to Mr. Haggard.

"Ye-es," answered Elsie dubiously. "Of course, they've got no souls."

The dreamer vanished.

"I don't agree," flashed the girl.

Elsie mounted on her high horse.

"Perhaps you know more about it than my father," she said.

"He doesn't agree, either," retorted the girl mercilessly.

She was right; and Elsie knew it. The vicar's daughter made a lame
recovery. Theology was always her father's weak point.

"Or mother," she said.

"Your mother doesn't know much about a horse," said the girl slowly.

"She knows about their souls," cried Elsie triumphantly.

"She can't if they haven't got them," retorted Boy, with the brutal
logic that distinguished her.

* * * * *

Boy Woodburn's room in the loft was characteristic of its owner.

Mr. Haggard said it was full of light and little el