“What are you going to do with her?” he panted.  There was no mistaking the grim trend of mischief in those flushed by sternly composed young faces.

“Hang her in chains over a slow fire,” said one of the boys.  Evidently they had been reading English history.

“Frow her down the pigs will d’vour her, every bit ’cept the palms of her hands,” said the other boy.  It was also evident that they had studied Biblical history.

The last proposal was the one which most alarmed Octavian, since it might be carried into effect at a moment’s notice; there had been cases, he remembered, of pigs eating babies.

“You surely wouldn’t treat my poor little Olivia in that way?” he pleaded.

“You killed our little cat,” came in stern reminder from three throats.

“I’m sorry I did,” said Octavian, and if there is a standard measurement in truths Octavian’s statement was assuredly a large nine.

“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,” said the girl, “but we can’t be sorry till we’ve done it.”

The inexorable child-logic rose like an unyielding rampart before Octavian’s scared pleadings.  Before he could think of any fresh line of appeal his energies were called out in another direction.  Olivia had slid off the roof and fallen with a soft, unctuous splash into a morass of muck and decaying straw.  Octavian scrambled hastily over the pigsty wall to her rescue, and at once found himself in a quagmire that engulfed his feet.  Olivia, after the first shock of surprise at her sudden drop through the air, had been mildly pleased at finding herself in close and unstinted contact with the sticky element that oozed around her, but as she began to sink gently into the bed of slime a feeling dawned on her that she was not after all very happy, and she began to cry in the tentative fashion of the normally good child.  Octavian, battling with the quagmire, which seemed to have learned the rare art of giving way at all points without yielding an inch, saw his daughter slowly disappearing in the engulfing slush, her smeared face further distorted with the contortions of whimpering wonder, while from their perch on the pigsty roof the three children looked down with the cold unpitying detachment of the Parcae Sisters.

“I can’t reach her in time,” gasped Octavian, “she’ll be choked in the muck.  Won’t you help her?”

“No one helped our cat,” came the inevitable reminder.

“I’ll do anything to show you how sorry I am about that,” cried Octavian, with a further desperate flounder, which carried him scarcely two inches forward.

“Will you stand in a white sheet by the grave?”

“Yes,” screamed Octavian.

“Holding a candle?”

“An’ saying ’I’m a miserable Beast’?”

Octavian agreed to both suggestions.

“For a long, long time?”

“For half an hour,” said Octavian.  There was an anxious ring in his voice as he named the time-limit; was there not the precedent of a German king who did open-air penance for several days and nights at Christmas-time clad only in his shirt?  Fortunately the children did not appear to have read German history, and half an hour seemed long and goodly in their eyes.