red-hot pokers.

His back was on fire, and his head was bursting and the soles of his feet
were very, very cold.

Then he heard, from a long way away, his father's voice:

"Now you will not disobey me again."

The door closed. Very slowly he raised himself, but moving was torture; he
put on his night-shirt and then quickly caught back a scream as it touched
his back. He moved to the window and closed it, then he climbed very slowly
on to his bed, and the tears that he had held back came, slowly at first,
and then more rapidly, at last in torrents. It was not the pain, although
that was bad, but it was the misery and the desolation and the great
heaviness of a world that held out no hope, no comfort, but only a great
cloud of unrelieved unhappiness.

At last, sick with crying, he fell asleep.


III

The first shadow of light was stealing across the white undulating common
and creeping through the bare trees of the desolate garden when four dark
figures, one tall, two fat, and one small, stole softly up the garden path.
They halted beneath the windows of the house; the snow had ceased falling,
and their breath rose in clouds above their heads. They danced a little in
the snow and drove their hands together, and then the tall figure said: