The borzoi stood in front of them.  His face had a look of foolish ecstasy.  He stared at Mr. Parsons, and as he stared he panted.  There was a red smear on his white breast; his open jaws still dripped a pink slaver.  It sprayed the ground in front of them, jerked out with his panting.

“Get away, you damned brute,” said Mr. Parsons.

Boris abashed himself; he stretched out his fore legs towards Mr. Parsons, shook his raised haunches, lifted up his great saw-like muzzle, and rolled into one monstrous cry a bark, a howl, a yawn.

Nicky heard it, and he looked out of the schoolroom window.  He saw the red smear on the white curly breast.  He saw his father in his shirt sleeves, carrying something in his arms that he had covered with his coat.

Under the tree of Heaven Dorothy and Michael, crouching close against their mother, cried quietly.  Frances was crying, too; for it was she who would have to tell Nicky.

Dorothy tried to console him.

“Jerry’s eyes would have turned green, if he had lived, Nicky.  They would, really.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.  They’d have been Jerry’s eyes.”

“But he wouldn’t have looked like Jerry.”

“I wouldn’t have cared what he looked like.  He’d have been Jerry.”

“I’ll give you Jane, Nicky, and all the kittens she ever has, if that would make up.”

“It wouldn’t.  You don’t seem to understand that it’s Jerry I want.  I wish you wouldn’t talk about him.”

“Very well,” said Dorothy, “I won’t.”

Then Grannie tried.  She recommended a holy resignation.  God, she said, had given Jerry to Nicky, and God had taken him away.

“He didn’t give him me, and he’d no right to take him.  Dorothy wouldn’t have done it.  She was only ragging.  But when God does things,” said Nicky savagely, “it isn’t a rag.”

He hated Grannie, and he hated Mr. Parsons, and he hated God.  But he loved Dorothy who had given him Jerry.

Night after night Frances held him in her arms at bed-time while Nicky said the same thing.  “If—­if I could stop seeing him.  But I keep on seeing him.  When he sat on the mustard and cress.  And when he bit me with his sleep-bites.  And when he looked at me out of the tree of Heaven.  Then I hear that little barking grunt he used to make when he was playing with himself—­when he dashed off into the bushes.

“And I can’t bear it.”

Night after night Nicky cried himself to sleep.

For the awful thing was that it had been all his fault.  If he had kept Jerry’s weight down Boris couldn’t have caught him.

“Daddy said so, Mummy.”

Over and over again Frances said, “It wasn’t your fault.  It was Don-Don’s.  He left the door open.  Surely you can forgive Don-Don?” Over and over again Nicky said, “I do forgive him.”

But it was no good.  Nicky became first supernaturally subdued and gentle, then ill.  They had to take him away from home, away from the sight of the garden, and away from Mr. Parsons, forestalling the midsummer holidays by two months.