I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls—­ it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour—­and on hurrying up I found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat, and two other children—­boys, one about twelve and one much younger—­ gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose trees.  The girl was white and frightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves so busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival.  Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the girl’s eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed.  I unfastened her at once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale.  She collapsed a moment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away at full speed into the safety of the stable-yard.

There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though for her life, and I divined that some horrid boys’ cruelty had been afoot.  It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usually is, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.

And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me frankly what their “gime” had been.  There was no vestige of shame in them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality.

That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there.  To them, though make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and natural and in no sense cruel.  Grown-ups did it too.  It was necessary for her good.

“We was going to burn her up, sir,” the older one informed me, answering my “Why?” with the explanation, “Because she wouldn’t believe what we wanted ’er to believe.”

And, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episode was so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty did I confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words.  The boys slunk off, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they had erred in principle.  It was their inheritance.  They had breathed it in with the atmosphere of their bringing-up.  They would renew the salutary torture when they could—­till she “believed” as they did.

I went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity and distress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the garden was attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than its predecessor.  I received the whole series, as it were, at once.  I felt like a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at different temperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the cooler strata were uppermost, the heated ones below.  Thus, I was caught by the goblin touch