He had the elemental heartlessness of the savage, which recognises no sufferings but its own, and refuses to be affected even by them.

When Nance’s kitten, presented to her by their neighbour, Mrs. Helier Baker, solved much speculation as to its sex by becoming a mother, Tom gladly undertook the task of drowning the superfluous offspring.  He got so much amusement out of it that, for weeks, Nance’s horrified inner vision saw little blind heads, half-drowned and mewing piteously, striving with feeble pink claws to climb out of the death-tub and being ruthlessly set swimming again till they sank.

She hurled herself at Tom as he gloated over his enjoyment, and would have asked nothing better than to treat him as he was treating the kittens—­righteous retribution in her case, not enjoyment!—­but he was too strong for her.  He simply kicked out behind, and before she could get up had thrust one of his half-drowned victims into the neck of her frock, and the clammy-dead feel of it and its pitiful screaming set her shuddering for months whenever she thought of it.

But now and again her tormentor overpassed the bounds and got his reward—­to Nance’s immediate satisfaction but subsequent increased tribulation.  For whenever he got a thrashing on her account he never failed to pay her out in the smaller change of persecution which never came to light.

On a pitch-dark, starless night, the high-hedged—­and in places deep-sunk—­lanes of Little Sark are as black as the inside of an ebony ruler.

When the moon bathes sea and land in a flood of shimmering silver, or on a clear night of stars—­and the stars in Sark, you must know, shine infinitely larger and closer and brighter than in most other places—­the darkness below is lifted somewhat by reason of the majestic width and height of the glittering dome above.  But when moon and stars alike are wanting, then the darkness of a Sark lane is a thing to be felt, and—­if you should happen to be a little girl of eight, with a large imagination and sharp ears that have picked up fearsome stories of witches and ghosts and evil spirits—­to be mortally feared.

Tom had a wholesome dread of such things himself.  But the fear of fourteen, in a great strong body and no heavenly spark of imagination, is not to be compared with the fear of eight and a mind that could quiver like a harp even at its own imaginings.  And, to compass his ends, he would blunt his already dull feelings and turn the darkness to his account.

When he knew Nance was out on such a night—­on some errand, or in at a neighbour’s—­to crouch in the hedge and leap silently out upon her was huge delight; and it was well worth braving the grim possibilities of the hedges in order to extort from her the anger in the bleat of terror which, as a rule, was all that her paralysed heart permitted, as she turned and fled.

Almost more amusing—­as considerably extending the enjoyment—­was it to follow her quietly on such occasions, yet not so quietly but that she was perfectly aware of footsteps behind, which stopped when she stopped and went on again when she went on, and so kept her nerves on the quiver the whole time.