"He once licked a boy a third bigger than he was, and you needn't call him sissy," one girl said once to a decrying friend.
To-day, as the boy and girl neared Mrs.Zelotes's house, Granville was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the terrible old lady.

He expected every minute to hear the grating upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a terrible intimidation of feminine will.

Granville had a mother as gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous.
He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen's grandmother.

He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently, when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little.
But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two marched past under the fire of Mrs.Zelotes's gaze.

Ellen had retaliated, not nobly, but as naturally under the conditions of her life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west wind.
[Illustration: He found himself walking home from school with her].