“I know what I see,” said the boy.

“I doubt it,” said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him again.  He was rapt deep and far into the joy of his work, and had no thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such another day to-morrow, with that light again on Lion’s Head, when he was at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must have been hearing some time without noting it.  It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of some one in mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties.  “Oh, don’t, Jeff!  Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!  Oh, please!  Oh, do let us be!  Oh, Jeff, don’t!”

Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the echoes, to make out where the cries came from.  Then, down at the point where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself in the shadow of a woodland, he saw the boy leaping back and forth across the track, with his dog beside him; he was shouting and his dog barking furiously; those screams and entreaties came from within the shadow.  Westover plunged down the lane headlong, with a speed that gathered at each bound, and that almost flung him on his face when he reached the level where the boy and the dog were dancing back and forth across the road.  Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoarse, and had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another.  They were really in no danger, for the boy held his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with their terror.

The painter hurled himself upon him, and, with a quick grip upon his collar, gave him half a dozen flat-handed blows wherever he could plant them and then flung him reeling away.

“You infernal little ruffian!” he roared at him; and the sound of his voice was enough for the dog; he began to scale the hill-side toward the house without a moment’s stay.

The children still crouched together, and Westover could hardly make them understand that they were in his keeping when he bent over them and bade them not be frightened.  The little girl set about wiping the child’s eyes on her apron in a motherly fashion; her own were dry enough, and Westover fancied there was more of fury than of fright in her face.  She seemed lost to any sense of his presence, and kept on talking fiercely to herself, while she put the little boy in order, like an indignant woman.

“Great, mean, ugly thing!  I’ll tell the teacher on him, that’s what I will, as soon as ever school begins.  I’ll see if he can come round with that dog of his scaring folks!  I wouldn’t ‘a’ been a bit afraid if it hadn’t ‘a’ been for Franky.  Don’t cry any more, Franky.  Don’t you see they’re gone?  I presume he thinks it smart to scare a little boy and a girl.  If I was a boy once, I’d show him!”