"Yes, my dear?"
"I want to tell you something."
"Yes, Timmy?"
"It's I who ought to be shot, not Josephine. It was all my fault. It had nothing to do with her."
"I don't know what you mean, Timmy. You mustn't talk in that exaggerated way. Of course it was foolish of you to bring the cat into the drawing-room, but still, you couldn't possibly have known that she would fly at Mrs. Crofton, or you wouldn't have done it."
"I did think she'd fly at Mrs. Crofton," he whispered.
Janet felt disagreeably startled. "What d'you mean, Timmy? D'you mean that you saw the cat fly at her before it happened?"
She had known the boy to have such strange, vivid premonitions of events which had come to pass.
But Timmy answered slowly: "No, I don't mean that. I mean, Mum, that I wanted to try an experiment. I wanted to see if Josephine would see what Flick saw—I mean if she'd see the ghost of Colonel Crofton's dog. She did, for the dog was close to Mrs. Crofton's arm—the arm hanging over the side of the sofa, you know."
"Oh, Timmy! How very, very wrong of you to do such a thing!"