"What are you keeping in that locked hutch?" she asked. "I
believe it's guinea-pigs. I'll have them all cleared away."
Conradin shut his lips tight, but the Woman ransacked his bedroom
till she found the carefully hidden key, and forthwith marched
down to the shed to complete her discovery. It was a cold
afternoon, and Conradin had been bidden to keep to the house.
From the furthest window of the dining-room the door of the shed
could just be seen beyond the corner of the shrubbery, and there
Conradin stationed himself. He saw the Woman enter, and then he
imagined her opening the door of the sacred hutch and peering down
with her short-sighted eyes into the thick straw bed where his god
lay hidden. Perhaps she would prod at the straw in her clumsy
impatience. And Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the
last time. But he knew as he prayed that he did not believe. He
knew that the Woman would come out presently with that pursed
smile he loathed so well on her face, and that in an hour or two
the gardener would carry away his wonderful god, a god no longer,
but a simple brown ferret in a hutch. And he knew that the Woman,
would triumph always as she triumphed now, and that he would grow
ever more sickly under her pestering and domineering and superior
wisdom, till one day nothing would matter much more with him, and
the doctor would be proved right.
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