“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 else.

It was the room of a boy, not of a girl; of a soldier, and not an artist.

The girl in truth had the limitations of her qualities.  She was so near to Nature that she had no need for Art, and no understanding of it.

The room knew neither carpet, curtain, nor blind.  The sun, the wind, and not seldom the rain and snow were free of it.  A small collapsible camp-bed, a copper basin and jug, an old chest, a corner cupboard—­these constituted the furniture.  The walls were whitewashed.  Three of them knew no pictures.  On one was her hunting-crop, a cutting-whip, and a pair of spurs; beneath them a boot-jack and three pairs of soft riding-boots in various stages of wear.  In the corner stood a tandem-whip.

Above the mantelpiece was one of the plates in which Cannibal had run the National, framing a photograph of the ugliest horse that ever won at Aintree—­and the biggest, to judge from the size of the plate.  Beneath it was a picture of the Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep, and a church almanac.  On the mantelpiece were the photographs of her mother, her father, Monkey Brand in the Putnam colours, and the Passion Play at Oberammergau; while pinned above the clock was the one poem, other than certain hymns and psalms, that Boy knew by heart.