"Well, if he really is good, perhaps--"

From that instant her doom was sealed. The children exchanged a
glance of realisation. Jeremy smiled. The lesson was continued. What
possessed Jeremy now? What possesses any child, naturally perhaps,
of a kindly and even sentimental nature at the sight of something
helpless and in its power? Is there any cruelty in after life like
the cruelty of a small boy, and is there anything more powerful,
more unreasoning, and more malicious than the calculating tortures
that small children devise for those weaker than themselves? Jeremy
was possessed with a new power.

It was something almost abstract in its manifestations; it was
something indecent, sinister, secret, foreign to his whole nature
felt by him now for the first time, unanalysed, of course, but
belonging, had he known it, to that world of which afterwards he was
often to catch glimpses, that world of shining white faces in dark
streets, of muffled cries from shuttered windows, of muttered
exclamations, half caught, half understood. He was never again to be
quite free from the neighbourhood of that half-world; he would never
be quite sure of his dominance of it until he died.

He had never felt anything like this power before. With the Jampot
his relations had been quite simple; he had been rebellious,
naughty, disobedient, and had been punished, and there was an end.
Now there was a game like tracking Red Indians in the prairie or
tigers in the jungle.

He watched Miss Jones and discovered many things about her. He
discovered that when she made mistakes in the things that she taught