The lane stretched out before them, curving away to the farm through the trees just beyond. To their right was the lake, cool and inviting on such a summer’s day, although Henry had forbidden her to go in today.

Something buzzed around them for a moment before being carried away by the breeze. The same wind picked up a dust devil and set the trees swaying with a hush before settling down again in the hard warm light.

“Henry,” Ellen lisped.

“Ah huh,” Henry replied, his attention still on the summer bursting all around them.

Ellen licked her lips and stared away to the distance. Henry knew when to wait.

Ellen tossed her head so that her honey blonde ponytail danced and swung around so that she could catch it in her teeth. Henry frowned at this and she let go at once and blushed. She had been scolded for chewing hair many times before, it was a bad habit.

Henry flexed his arm, a thick athlete’s limb that burst from under his rolled up shirt, and began to massage at a dull ache he had picked up from somewhere. Not that he noticed, for all his nonchalance, his attention was on the girl.

At five feet two, she stood barely to his chest, although her long smooth tanned legs made her look taller or would have done if she had not been standing next to Henry.

Henry stood six feet three in his socks and carried himself with the grace of a man well used to manual labour. Not that he was uneducated. If he hadn’t had a college degree he might not have been trusted with the guardianship of the girls.

“Henry,” Ellen tried again.

He was used to this; he knew it would take some time to speak her piece.

At times like this the 20-year-old looked more like the 16-year-old she had been when she had first come to him, although there the resemblance ended. That troubled insecure girl had gone and Ellen had all the makings of smart young woman.

“I have something to tell you,” she whispered.

“I guessed as much.” Henry pulled a sympathetic face that pulled his lips tight and put crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.

“I-I think you’re gonna… going to be mad,” she said amending her speech as he had taught her.

“Grade one mad or more?” He asked.

Ellen chewed her bottom lip and looked at her shoes.

“More,” she said, “Much more. Grade three or four mad even.”

Henry stopped and regarded her sternly just as a pigeon began to coo somewhere off in the woods.

“I think you had better tell me,” Henry said sharply.

Ellen nodded and they began to walk again.

“Last weekend when I was in town I bumped into Tam Williams,” Ellen spoke softly and awaited the storm.

“Go on,” Henry urged.

“I got into his car,” she said tentatively.

“Where did you go?”

“Oh nowhere, I swear, we just talked. I mean, I told him what you said and that I couldn’t see him anymore,” Ellen gabbled; her eyes suddenly wide in panic.

“Did you plan on meeting him?” Henry could see how a chance meeting might have happened and how she might have wanted the privacy of his car to let him down gently.

Ellen shook her head vigorously, her eyes like saucers. That sort of defiance would have warranted a five at least.

Henry smiled and then shrugging he said, “We could make it a grade one if it would make you feel better, for getting into the car, but since you owned up, I think we could overlook it this time.

A grade one was an agreed punishment between him and the girls. By Henry’s standards it was little more than a reprimand; a simple bare-bottomed spanking over his knee.

There were a range of such punishments, but for the most part he didn’t need to set one. Every once in a while on of the girls would come to him with a confession and they would settle on a grade one or grade two punishment; a grade two being a sound spanking with a hairbrush and some corner time.

Henry smiled to himself as he remembered Ellen’s first spanking, then he saw the nervous shift to her stance and knew that she wasn’t finished confessing.

“There is something else,” she said, her eyes flicking back and forth as she rubbed her thighs nervously.

“I see,” he said, his dark baritone becoming a little deeper.

“We… I… that is… well… While we talked, well… he offered me a cigarette.” Ellen risked a look at Henry before quickly looking away.

Henry stopped in his tracks and folded his heavy arms, fixing her with a stare.

“You smoked it?” He let his disappointment show.

“I… I took a puff, just one, before giving it back to him. I’m sorry.”

Henry nodded and began to walk again. She could see the disappointment on his face and bowed her head. Then seeing him pick up the pace, she hurried after him.

“I have a good mind to give you a three,” Henry growled. “But I suppose it was just one puff and you did own up.”

Ellen nodded. She was relieved, wasn’t she?

The two of them walked in silence for a while, but at the bend in the road where the farmhouse came into sight she paused.

“What’s the matter? You have had plenty of two’s before?” Henry sounded encouraging. “Let’s go and get it over with.”

“I promised I would never smoke again,” Ellen said chewing at her lip. “I-I think I deserve more.”

Henry nodded sadly.

“I suppose a three is fair, on principle anyway,” he said.

“You gave me a three last time, you said if… well…” Ellen didn’t finish.

“Do you think what you did was as bad as what Hayley is being punished for?” His question was in earnest.

“No but…” Ellen didn’t know what to say, since he put it like that.

“I tell you what. We will make it an augmented three. You can join Hayley and then go without supper too.”

With that Henry strode away up the rise to the white clapboard house with a wrap-around porch.

Ellen looked after him and quailed. It was fair, but… the butterflies took flight in her stomach and she felt a little sick… but now she had to go through with it. Then she saw that Henry was halfway to the house and fearing he would think her stalling, she scampered after him, not unlike a puppy.

As they reached the house they could see Hayley standing on the porch. She was facing the planking on the wall by door, the skirts of her floral summer dress pinned up in back and her white cotton panties tangled at her ankles so that her bottom was completely bared to anyone who might chance by.

Ellen could not help looking at the 19-year-old’s firm prominent behind, welted and stained as it was by Henry’s belt at an earlier confrontation with him. The punished girl held a fresh peeled switch behind her, tucked under exposed bottom where the curve of the buttocks met her thigh. It was a promise of a more stinging punishment to come and Ellen was suddenly grateful that she had not talked herself into a four as well. She would be standing beside her adopted sister soon enough.

Henry was waiting for her in the parlour, the strop already folded and straining between his powerful arms. He nodded and she gulped.

Then without being told she crossed the room working at the button on her cotton cut-offs and let them fall to the floor where she stepped out of them. Then turning away from him to face the couch, she slipped her thin panties down and bent forwards over the back of the padded seat before her.

Her nude buttocks thrust upwards in one sensuous move as he back arched down. She took care to gather her thighs together as she had been taught and then shuffled back a little to offer Henry the small spheres of her bottom.

“Alright Ellen, remember to breath and bite down on the cushion if you need to,” Henry said as lay on the first stroke with a will. The blaze of the impact stole Ellen’s breath and outside on the porch the sound of it made Hayley jump as she remembered her own punishment that morning.

Ellen took four more before she groaned and spluttered to a sob. By then her bottom was tomato ripe and already ragged welts were rising in irregular lines.

Henry paused for a moment to let her gather herself; after all it was going to be a long afternoon.

Ends