-about a dog. Do please come to our house and see our uncle--at
least he's not--but it's the same thing. We didn't kill the fox, if
that's what you think--indeed we didn't. Oh, dear, I do wish you'd think
of your own little boys and girls if you've got any, or else about when
you were little. You wouldn't be so horrid if you did."

I don't know which, if either, of these objects the fox-hound master
thought of, but he said:

"Well, lead on," and he let go Noel's ear and Alice snuggled up to Noel
and put her arm round him.

It was a frightened procession, whose cheeks were pale with
alarm--except those between white whiskers, and they were red--that
wound in at our gate and into the hall, among the old oak furniture and
black and white marble floor and things.

Dora and Daisy were at the door. The pink petticoat lay on the table,
all stained with the gore of the departed. Dora looked at us all, and
she saw that it was serious. She pulled out the big oak chair and said:

"Won't you sit down?" very kindly to the white-whiskered magistrate.

He grunted, but did as she said.

Then he looked about him in a silence that was not comforting, and so
did we.

At last he said:

"Come, you didn't try to bolt. Speak the truth, and I'll say no more."

We said we had.

Then he laid the fox on the table, spreading out the petticoat under it,
and he took out a knife and the girls hid their faces. Even Oswald did
not care to look. Wounds in battle are all very well, but it's different
to see a dead fox cut into with a knife.

Next moment the magistrate wiped something on his handkerchief and then
laid it on the table and put one of my cartridges beside it. It was the
bullet that had killed the fox.

"Look here!" he said. And it was too true. The bullets were the same.

A thrill of despair ran through Oswald. He knows now how a hero feels
when he is innocently accused of a crime and the judge is putting on the
black cap, and the evidence is convulsive and all human aid is despaired
of.

"I can't help it," he said, "we didn't kill it, and that's all there is
to it."

The white-whiskered magistrate may have been master of the fox-hounds,
but he was not master of his temper, which is more important, I should
think, than a lot of beastly dogs.

He said several words which Oswald would never repeat, much less use in
his own conversing, and besides that he called us "obstinate little
beggars."

Then suddenly Albert's uncl