"I keep two watch-dogs at 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."