When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon, the little boy and girl were fairly friendly.  Only there was talk of kissing at the door, started by the little girl’s uncle, and this the little 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.

CHAPTER IV

THE BIG HOUSE OF PORTENTS

In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that was all strange.  Novel was the outer house with its high portico and fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window; its big front door with the polished brass knocker and the fan-light above.  Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new life to its very center.