“Oh yes, you can go to school, there is neither reason nor justice in your staying here. They might have prevented it to-night if they’d liked.” “How?” “Oh, you wouldn’t understand.” “Well, of all the beasts! Girls’ secrets are such fools of things, too! Don’t look like that, it’s awful with your scratchy face.” “Oh, go to bed, do!” “I wish you would, I think you are going to be sick, I’ll call Mary.” “Dacre, don’t dare to, I’m as well as anything. I wish I was a witch and could fly over those trees on a broomstick.” She peered eagerly out of the window, out over the tree tops and the whirling leaves, up into the dark heavens. “You look witchy enough now with your awful yellow hair that looks as if it were alive with fire-flies.” “Dacre, go to bed, do, I want to think of the plan.” “Oh, if you want that, I’ll clear, I’d have gone before only I thought you were going to be sick.” Gwen turned a half-mocking half-wistful look upon him. “You’re a good old thing and it isn’t your fault if you are an ass, only I wish you weren’t,” she said to herself when he had gone, “it wouldn’t all be so beastly then.” She went off slowly to her little blue-and-white bedroom and let Mary put her to bed in a cold silence which she positively refused to break. CHAPTER VIII. THE ins and outs and general details of Gwen’s plan of campaign would in no wise interest, much less edify the moral reader. It is enough that the plan was a brilliant success, and its organization and execution would have done credit to the Prince of Darkness himself. Her tactics were by no means volcanic, they were resolute, gradual, and in a way scriptural, line upon line, precept upon precept, first the seed, then the blade, then the full corn in the ear. When the initial steps were passed, just leaving the air well charged with vague apprehension and the minds of men ripe for some new development, active measures set in, in a careless unconscious sort of way, as if the divine order of things had just received a passing jar, no more, but then this jar continued and increased and grew in dimensions till the very bones of the jarred shook in their skins, and it was as much as their souls could do to hold themselves in their bodies. Three months after the plan’s inception, the amazing goings-on of Dacre, the wild originality of his pranks, the consistent sustained _diablerie_ of his outbursts, the terrible all-pervadingness of his personality, had succeeded in completely upheaving the souls of his parents and filling the entire household with a fearful sense of insecurity, as of a community conscious of the presence amongst them of an invisible infernal machine, that moves by some hidden power all over everywhere and can neither be caught nor compassed. Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes, who kept a close eye on the affairs of the Hall children, had felt now for some time that there was too much subtlety in this departure of Dacre’s to be all his own.