ado Hugh lifted her down and carried her to his study,
where he administered a sound smacking. The result astonished him
considerably.

"Do you think you can stop me from dancing by beating me?"

Magda arraigned him with passionate scorn.

"I do," he returned grimly. "If you hurt people enough you can stop them
from committing sin. That is the meaning of remedial punishment."

"I don't believe it!" she stormed at him. "You might hurt me till I
_died_ of hurting, but you couldn't make me good--not if I hated your
hurting me all the time! Because it isn't good to hate," she added out
of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.

"Then you'd better learn to like being punished--if that will make you
good," retorted Hugh.

Magda sped out into the woods. Hugh's hand had been none too light,
and she was feeling physically and spiritually sore. Her small soul was
aflame with fierce revolt.

Just to assure herself of the liberty of the individual and of the fact
that "hurting couldn't make her good," she executed a solitary little
dance on the green, mossy sward beneath the trees. It was rather a
painful process, since certain portions of her anatomy still tingled
from the retributive strokes of justice, but she set her teeth and
accomplished the dance with a consciousness of unholy glee that added
appreciably to the quality of the performance.

"Are you the Fairy Queen?"

The voice came suddenly out of the dim, enfolding silence of the woods,
and Magda paused in the midst of a final pirouette. A man was standing
leaning against the trunk of a tree, watching her with whimsical grey
eyes. Behind him, set up in the middle of a clearing amongst the trees,
an easel and stool evidenced his recent occupation.

Magda returned the scrutiny of the grey eyes. She was no whit
embarrassed and slowly lowered her foot--she had been toe-dancing--to
its normal position while she surveyed the newcomer with interest.

He was a tall, lean specimen of mankind, and the sunlight, quivering
between the interlacing boughs above his head, flickered on to kinky
fair hair that looked almost absurdly golden contrasted with the brown
tan of the face beneath it. It was a nice face, Magda decided, with a
dogged, squarish jaw that appealed to a certain tenacity of spirit which
was one of her own unchildish characteristics, and the keen dark-grey
eyes she encountered were so unlike the cold light-grey of her father's
that it seemed ridiculous the Eng