There was compassion in Laura’s eyes and in his mother’s, but Cora was irresistible, and they always ended by laughing in spite of themselves; and though they pleaded for Hedrick in private, their remonstrances proved strikingly ineffective.  Hedrick was the only person who had ever used the high hand with Cora:  she found repayment too congenial.  In the daytime he could not go in the front yard, but Cora’s window would open and a tenderly smiling Cora lean out to call affectionately, “Don’t walk on the grass—­darling little boy!” Or, she would nod happily to him and begin to sing: 

    “Oh come beloved, love let me press thee,
    While I caress thee
    In one long kiss, Lolita. . . . "

One terror still hung over him.  If it fell—­as it might at any fatal moment—­then the utmost were indeed done upon him; and this apprehension bathed his soul in night.  In his own circle of congenial age and sex he was, by virtue of superior bitterness and precocity of speech, a chief—­a moral castigator, a satirist of manners, a creator of stinging nicknames; and many nourished unhealed grievances which they had little hope of satisfying against him; those who attempted it invariably departing with more to avenge than they had brought with them.  Let these once know what Cora knew. . . .  The vision was unthinkable!

It was Cora’s patent desire to release the hideous item, to spread the scandal broadcast among his fellows—­to ring it from the school-bells, to send it winging on the hot winds of Hades!  The boys had always liked his yard and the empty stable to play in, and the devices he now employed to divert their activities elsewhere were worthy of a great strategist.  His energy and an abnormal ingenuity accomplished incredible things:  school had been in session several weeks and only one boy had come within conversational distance of Cora;—­him Hedrick bore away bodily, in simulation of resistless high spirits, a brilliant exhibition of stagecraft.

And then Cora’s friend, Mrs. Villard, removed her son Egerton from the private school he had hitherto attended, and he made his appearance in Hedrick’s class, one morning at the public school.  Hedrick’s eye lighted with a savage gleam; timidly the first joy he had known for a thousand years crept into his grim heart.  After school, Egerton expiated a part of Cora’s cruelty.  It was a very small part, and the exploit no more than infinitesimally soothing to the conqueror, but when Egerton finally got home he was no sight for a mother.

Thus Hedrick wrought his own doom:  Mrs. Villard telephoned to Cora, and Cora went immediately to see her.

It happened to Hedrick that he was late leaving home the next morning.  His entrance into his classroom was an undeniable sensation, and within ten minutes the teacher had lost all control of the school.  It became necessary to send for the principal.  Recess was a frantic nightmare for Hedrick, and his homeward progress at noon a procession of such uproarious screamers as were his equals in speed.  The nethermost depths were reached when an ignoble pigtailed person he had always trodden upon flat-footed screamed across the fence from next door, as he reached fancied sanctuary in his own backyard: