And so, at last, the chastisement began. After two days of waiting and half an hour of scolding, the condemned felt the first pain of punishment. Vivien’s buttocks clenched briefly and then relaxed.

Varley’s spanking technique – which had been perfected over almost a decade on many, many female bottoms – was characterised by a savoured care and control. He took his time over the spankings, resting his hand between smacks and he never, ever, lost his temper. He would tap the offending buttocks once, twice – to prepare the waiting girl – and then he would bring down his palm fast, SMACK!, onto the flesh. As the buttocks registered the pain, Varley would return his hand to the girl’s waist, giving time for the pain to build across her rear. When the bottom relaxed again, and when the red of his handprint started showing on the girl’s skin, he returned his hand to the bottom, tapped it again, once, twice, sometimes three times and then, SMACK!, would bring it down again.

So it was that Vivien’s second chastisement over Mr Varley’s knees proceeded. Every twenty seconds or so, the silence of the study was broken by a violent SMACK! While the other girls in her year slipped into bed and sipped cocoa, chatting softly to their roommates, Vivien paid the price for her foolishness.

For while her campaign over the past six weeks, to antagonise teachers with the goal of returning to Varley, had been successful, it had hardly been wise. Lust had guided her, along with an ill-conceived faith that the headmaster would never truly hurt her (for was there not, just the slimmest chance, Vivien had asked herself over and over, that he could like her – in that way?). But as she lay in disgrace across his lay, her bottom a salutary red, her misplaced hopes were dashed. Each strike of his hand eroded the fantasy further. As the sounds of chastisement bounced from the walls again, and again, and again, until thirty smacks had been delivered to the waiting rear, Vivien’s misplaced romantic imaginings were gradually bought to an end.

How could he, she wonders again, how could he be doing this to her?

She had thought the brutality of her last punishment from him – six cold cuts across her palms, delivered by the rattan cane that hangs behind his desk – was as bad as it could get. She had dreaded a repeat performance today.

But never could she have guessed that it would be this.

A girl, in the first flourishing throes of womanhood, bent over his knee like some silly oversized infant across the paternal lap to receive what he had referred to, just ten minutes before, as a “very sound smacked bottom”.

And as if even that wasn’t dreadful enough, here he was fussing with her skirt, pulling and folding in an age-old ritual experienced by many thousands of her kind before, to prepare her tightly knickered bottom for punishment.

How could he, she wonders again, as the first sobs come, oh how could he?