He beat her with a stick he found near, he smacked her face and pulled her hair and bumped himself up and down on her chest, and all in such solemn, painstaking earnestness that she could only laugh even when he really hurt her.

“Dood now?” he said at last anxiously.  And she began to weep noisily, with covered face and shaking shoulders, in the proper, penitent way.  And then he put his darling arms round her neck and hugged her, and said “Ju-Ju” in a choking little voice, and patted her cheeks, and gave her a hundred eager, wide, wet kisses till she was better.

Then they played chasings, and the General fell down twenty times, and scratched his little knees and hands, and struggled up again. and staggered on.

Presently Judy stood still in a hurry; there was a tick working its slow way into her wrist.  Only its two back legs were left out from under the skin, and for a long time she pulled and pulled without any success.  Then it broke in two, and she had to leave one half in for little Grandma and kerosene to extract on their return.

Two or three minutes it had taken her to try to move it, and when she looked up the General had toddled same distance away, and was travelling along as fast as ever his little fat legs would carry him, thinking he was racing her.  Just as she, started after him he looked back, his eyes dancing, his face dimpled and mischievous, and, oh! so dirty..

And then—­ah, God!

It is so hard to write it.  My pen has had only happy writing to-do so far, and now!

“You rogue!” Judy called, pretending to run very quickly.  Then the whole world seemed to rise up before her.

There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt, naked things that had been ringbarked long ago.  All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it.  One wild ringing cry Judy gave, then she leaped across the ground, her arms outstretched to the little lad running with laughing eyes and lips straight to death.

The crash shook the trees around, the very air seemed splintered.

They had heard it—­all the others—­heard the wild cry and then the horrible thud.

How their knees shook what blanched faces they had as they rushed towards the sound!

They lifted it off the little bodies—­the long, silvered trunk with the gum dead and dried in streaks upon it.  Judy was face downwards, her arms spread out.

And underneath her was the General, a little shaken, mightily astonished, but quite unhurt.  Meg clasped him for a minute, but then laid him down, and gathered with the others close around Judy.

Oh, the little dark, quiet head, the motionless body, in its pink, crushed frock, the small, thin, outspread hands!

“Judy!” Pip said, in a voice of beseeching agony.  But the only answer was the wind at the tree-tops and the frightened breathings of the others.