Foolishly they averted their glances, after that first little laugh of sudden realisation; but again their eyes met, and this time they laughed loud and long with a joy that took away not only all fears of the Gratcher forever, but their first embarrassment of themselves.

Then, with no word of the matter whatsoever, each knowing that the other understood, they began to talk of life again, feeling older and wiser, which truly they were.
For, though many in time wax brave to beard their Gratcher even in his lair, only the very wise learn this--that the best way to be rid of him is to laugh him away--that no Gratcher ever fashioned by the ingenuity of terror-loving humans can keep his evil power over one to whom he has become funny.
The passing of the Gratcher had left no pedestal crying for another idol.
In its stead, for his own chastening and with all reverence, the little boy erected the spirit of that God which the Bible tells of, who is all-wise and loving, yet no sentimentalist, as witness his sudden devastations among the first-born of all things, from white rabbits to men.
But an idol next went down that not only left a wretched vacancy in the boy's pantheon, but fell against his heart and made an ugly wound.

It was as if he had become suddenly clear-seeing on that day when the Gratcher shrivelled in the blast of his laugh.
A little later came the father on his annual visit, and the dire thing was done.

The most ancient and honoured of all the idols fell with a crash.

A perfect father was lost in some common, swaggering, loud-voiced, street-mannered creature, grotesquely self-satisfied, of a cheap, shabby smartness, who came flaunting those things he should not have flaunted, and proclaiming in every turn of his showy head his lack of those things without which the little boy now saw no one could be a gentleman.
He cried in his bed that night, after futile efforts to believe that some fearful change had been wrought in his father.