"We were just pretending," Robert said. For an instant the man and the two children stood with the doll house between them. They were each aware that they had started a game that must be played out now to the bitter end, no matter how frightening it became. "We'll soon know!" Durkin said. Durkin bent swiftly, and without glancing at the children, picked up the house, and raised it until the ground floor windows were on a level with his eyes. He stared in. Children do not self-consciously engage in gruesome pranks--even when they hate. Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and become social attitudes remain in children appallingly direct. Children are thus exposed to adult censure for acts which they would never dream of performing in a frame of reference removed from the playground and tied in with their socially-consolidated attitudes of respect toward home, school, and parents. Children chalk up sidewalks, ring doorbells and throw stones at windows and are almost instantly sorry. But Durkin knew nothing of that. He only saw himself sitting on a red-hot stove, his long legs drawn up grasshopper fashion on both sides of his lank body. What was even more shocking, he saw himself as a fiend incarnate. The children had done an astonishingly ingenious job of making a devil out of him by painting him in the darkest colors imaginable. In fact, they had painted him black. The ill-fitting store suit had been removed, and with the aid of Emily's water-color set, and Robert's clay modeling set he had been made to resemble a demon being roasted over a spit. Utterly fiendish was his charcoal-dark aspect of face and limb. Horns sprouted from his temples, and a long, forked tail, ash-gray in hue, coiled down over the stove like some evil brand snatched from the burning. There were tiny gleaming coals in the stove fashioned of red isinglass. The stove had gone with the house, but by the matchless artistry of childhood something new had been added, and as Durkin stared all of the color drained from his face. He was sitting directly over the coals, exposed to the cruelly searing blast in every part of his anatomy. For an instant the illusion of searing heat was so real that he responded psychosomatically. His nostrils dilated with the odor of burning flesh, and his nerve-roots shrieked as if irradiated by intolerable pain. Then reality came sweeping back. Instead of an imaginary projection of himself he saw only a ridiculous wooden doll sprawled akimbo on a toy stove. Shaking with rage, Durkin set the house down, swung about, and gripped his stepson savagely by the wrist. "Just pretending, were you?" he muttered. "Just waiting for me to come out here, and pat you on the back." Robert tried to break free. Sick with fear, he tugged and twisted, but Durkin had stronger fingers than a demon, and a deeper understanding of how a frightened boy could make a fool of a man by using his smallness as a cloak.