He was too considerate to tell her that this was as good as impossible—­that she quite lacked the qualities necessary for that.  Instead, he reassured her with the chivalrous fiction that he, at least, would like her as well as if she were a boy.  And, indeed, as a girl, she was not wholly unsatisfactory.  True, she played “school” (of all things!) in preference to “wild animals,” practised scales on the piano an hour every day, wore a sun-hat frequently—­spite of which she was freckled—­wore shoes and stockings on the hottest days, when one’s feet are so hungry for the cool, springy turf, and performed other acts repugnant to a soul that has brought itself erect.  But she was fresh and dainty to look at, like an opened morning glory, with pretty frocks that the French lady whose name was Madmasel made her wear every day, and her eyes were much like certain flowers in the bed under the bay-window, with very long, black lashes that got all stuck together when she cried; and she made superb capital letters, far better than the little boy’s, though she was a year younger.

Also, which was perhaps her chief charm, she could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the Gratcher, a monstrous thing, half beast, half human, which was often seen back of the house; sometimes flitting through the grape-arbour, sometimes coming out of the dark cellar, sometimes peering around corners.  It was a thing that went on enormous crutches, yet could always catch you if it saw you by daylight out of its right eye, its left being serviceable only at night, when, if you were wise, you kept in the house.  Once the Gratcher saw you with its right eye the crutches swung toward you and you were caught:  it picked you up and began to look you all over, with the eyes in the ends of its fingers.  This tickled you so that you went crazy in a minute.

Nancy feared the Gratcher, and she became supremely lovely to the 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