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When this had been said we filled in the grave and covered the top of it with dry leaves and sticks to make it look like the rest of the wood. People might think it was treasure, and dig it up, if they thought there was anything buried there, and we wished the poor fox to sleep sound and not to be disturbed.

The interring was over. We folded up Dora’s blood-stained pink cotton petticoat, and turned to leave the sad spot.

We had not gone a dozen yards down the lane when we heard footsteps and a whistle behind us, and a scrabbling and whining, and a gentleman with two fox-terriers had called a halt just by the place where we had laid low the “little red rover.”

The gentleman stood in the lane, but the dogs were digging–we could see their tails wagging and see the dust fly. And we saw where. We ran back.

“Oh, please, do stop your dogs digging there!” Alice said.

The gentleman said “Why?”

“Because we’ve just had a funeral, and that’s the grave.”

The gentleman whistled, but the fox-terriers were not trained like Pincher, who was brought up by Oswald. The gentleman took a stride through the hedge gap.

“What have you been burying–a pet dicky bird, eh?” said the gentleman, kindly. He had riding breeches and white whiskers.

We did not answer, because now, for the first time, it came over all of us, in a rush of blushes and uncomfortableness, that burying a fox is a suspicious act. I don’t know why we felt this, but we did.

Noel said, dreamily:

“We found his murdered body in the wood,
And dug a grave by which the mourners stood.”

But no one heard him except Oswald, because Alice and Dora and Daisy were all jumping about with the jumps of unstrained anguish, and saying, “Oh, call them off! Do! do!–oh, don’t, don’t! Don’t let them dig!”

Alas! Oswald was, as usual, right. The ground of the grave had not been trampled down hard enough, and he had said so plainly at the time, but his prudent counsels had been over-ruled. Now these busy-bodying, meddling, mischief-making fox-terriers (how different from Pincher, who minds his own business unless told otherwise) had scratched away the earth and laid bare the reddish tip of the poor corpse’s tail.

We all turned to go without a word, it seemed to be no use staying any longer.

But in a moment the gentleman with the whiskers had got Noel and Dicky each by an ear–they were nearest him. H. O. hid in the hedge. Oswald, to whose noble breast sneakishness is, I am thankful to say, a stranger, would have scorned to escape, but he ordered his sisters to bunk in a tone of command which made refusal impossible.

“And bunk sharp, too,” he added sternly. “Cut along home.”

So they cut.

The white-whiskered gentleman now encouraged his mangy fox-terriers, by every means at his command, to continue their vile and degrading occupation; holding on all the time to the ears of Dicky and Noel, who scorned to ask for mercy. Dicky got purple and Noel got white. It was Oswald who said:

“Don’t hang on to them, sir. We won’t cut. I give you my word of honor.”

” Your word of honor,” said the gentleman, in tones for which, in happier days, when people drew their bright blades and fought duels, I would have had his heart’s dearest blood. But now Oswald remained calm and polite as ever.

“Yes, on my honor,” he said, and the gentleman dropped the ears of Oswald’s brothers at the sound of his firm, unserving tones. He dropped the ears and pulled out the body of the fox and held it up. The dogs jumped up and yelled.

“Now,” he said, “you talk very big about words of honor. Can you speak the truth?”

Dicky said, “If you think we shot it, you’re wrong. We know better than that.”