She put her arms round him.  “I’m so sorry,” she said feelingly; “so sorry, Timmy, about your poor cat!  But you know, my dear, that if—­if she were left alive, we could never feel comfortable for a single moment.  You see, when an animal has done that sort of thing once, it may do it again.”

“Josephine would never do it again,” said Timmy obstinately, and he caught his breath with a sob.

“You can’t possibly know that, my dear.  She would of course have other kittens, and then some day, when some perfectly harmless person happened to come anywhere near her, she would fly at him or her, just as she did at Mrs. Crofton.”

“No, she wouldn’t—­she didn’t do anything like that when she had her last kittens.”

“I know that, Timmy.  But you heard what Dr. O’Farrell said.”

“Dr. O’Farrell isn’t God,” said Timmy scornfully.

“No, my dear, Dr. O’Farrell is certainly not God; but he is a very sensible, humane human being—­and the last man to condemn even an animal to death, without good reason.”

There was a rather painful pause.  Janet Tosswill felt as if the child were withdrawing himself from her, both in a physical and in a mental sense.

“Mum?” he said in a low, heart-broken voice.

“Yes, my dear?”

“I want to tell you something.”

“Yes, Timmy?”

“It’s I who ought to be shot, not Josephine.  It was all my fault.  It had nothing to do with her.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Timmy.  You mustn’t talk in that exaggerated way.  Of course it was foolish of you to bring the cat into the drawing-room, but still, you couldn’t possibly have known that she would fly at Mrs. Crofton, or you wouldn’t have done it.”

“I did think she’d fly at Mrs. Crofton,” he whispered.

Janet felt disagreeably startled.  “What d’you mean, Timmy?  D’you mean that you saw the cat fly at her before it happened?”

She had known the boy to have such strange, vivid premonitions of events which had come to pass.

But Timmy answered slowly:  “No, I don’t mean that.  I mean, Mum, that I wanted to try an experiment.  I wanted to see if Josephine would see what Flick saw—­I mean if she’d see the ghost of Colonel Crofton’s dog.  She did, for the dog was close to Mrs. Crofton’s arm—­the arm hanging over the side of the sofa, you know.”

“Oh, Timmy!  How very, very wrong of you to do such a thing!”

“I know it was wrong.”  Timmy twisted himself about.  “But it’s no good you saying that to me now—­it only makes me more miserable.”

“But I have to say so, my boy.”  Janet was not a Scotch mother for nothing.  “I have to say so, Timmy, and I shall not be sorry this happened, if it makes you behave in a different way—­as I hope it will—­the whole of your life long.”

“It won’t—­I won’t let it—­if anything is done to Josephine!”

But she went on, a little desperately, yet speaking in a quiet, collected way:  “I believe the things you say, Timmy.  I believe you do see things which other people are not allowed to see.  But that ought to make you far, far more careful—­not less careful.  Try to be an instrument for good, not for evil, my dear, dear child.”