His spirits sank a little as he
approached the gate. He could see through the trees the fat
caravan-owner gesticulating at the door. Helped by the villagers, he
had tracked William. Phrases floated to him through the summer air.

"Mine beautiful caravan.... _Ach.... Gott in Himmel_!"

He could see the gardener smiling in the distance. There was a small
blue bruise on his shining head. William judged from the smile that he
had laid his formal complaint before authority. William noticed that
his father looked pale and harassed. He noticed, also, with a thrill
of horror, that his hand was bound up, and that there was a long
scratch down his cheek. He knew the cat had scratched _somebody_,
but ... Crumbs!

A small boy came down the road and saw William hesitating at the open
gateway.

"_You'll_ catch it!" he said cheerfully. "They've wrote to say you
wasn't in school."

William crept round to the back of the house beneath the bushes. He
felt that the time had come to give himself up to justice, but he
wanted, as the popular saying is, to be sure of "getting his money's
worth." There was the tin half full of green paint in the tool shed.
He'd had his eye on it for some time. He went quietly round to the
tool shed. Soon he was contemplating with a satisfied smile a green
and enraged cat and a green and enraged hen. Then, bracing himself for
the effort, he delivered himself up to justice. When all was said and
done no punishment could be really adequate to a day like that.

* * * * *

Dusk was falling. William gazed pensively from his bedroom window. He
was reviewing his day. He had almost forgotten the stormy and
decidedly unpleasant scene with his father. Mr. Brown's rhetoric had
been rather lost on William, because its pearls of sarcasm had been so
far above his head. And William had not been really loth to retire at
once to bed. After all, it had been a very tiring day.

Now his thoughts were going over some of its most exquisite
moments--the moments when the pea and the gardener's head met and
rebounded with such satisfactory force; the moment when he swung along
the high road, monarch of a caravan and a mule and the whole wide
world; the moment when the scarecrow hunched up and collapsed so
realistically; the cat covered with green paint.... After all it was
his last day. He saw himself from to-morrow onward leading a quiet and
blameless life, walking sedately to school, working a