"Sorry sir," said the Moderator. "Pain is easier to invoke, and longer lasting. Have a happy day!"

The two siblings exchanged a look of grim comprehension over the breakfast table when the butler laid the broadsheet in front of them. The Morning Post's headline was painfully familiar to them now. In stark black and white, the proclamation that yet another child had gone missing on the shores of Lake Conmere drove away any hint of an appetite the two of them might have had.

Where hunger, discomfort and anger had all failed to rouse her before, cruelty, at last, animated her to motion. "Well then," she said, sitting forward from her armchair. "Perhaps the hunger will be an object lesson to you. Perhaps, as your belly rumbles, and your sister cries in pain, you will think on what it means to have duties, and what it means to fail in them. Perhaps then you will not disappoint me again."