3

The doctor's verdict on his patient was favorable.

"Another two weeks," he declared, "and we shall have him con moto, allegro assai! It is a strong constitution, fortunately—fortissimo! Continue with the treatment along the lines I have laid down. The signora Lubbage—she has seen him?"

"Yes," said Dido, "she put these here cobwebs on him. She ain't home just now."

"Ah, that is good—I mean, that is good she has seen him. Eccolo, I will return on Friday," said Dr. Subito, and made off at top speed, casting wary glances along the road in either direction.

Captain Hughes was wakeful, after the doctor's inspection, and somewhat fretful.

"I could eat a sturgeon, bones and all," he announced, and Dido glanced around the bare little room.

"We're clean out of prog, Cap," she said. "Wait a couple o' minutes and I'll see what I can fetch in."

Mr. Firkin still sat out in the hillside with his sheep, a couple of miles away, but the basket from Tegleaze Manor was close at hand, temptingly in view through Mrs. Lubbage's kitchen window.

"I spose she did lock the door?" Dido said to herself.

She walked along to the witch's cottage carrying Captain Hughes's clasp knife, with which she thought it would be easy enough to force the door. She tried it to make certain: yes, locked. Just as she was about to insert the knife blade between door and doorpost she experienced a curious prickling sensation in her hands; at the same time a small buzzing voice—where? inside her head perhaps—said, faintly but audibly,

"This is a hoodoo lock. Beware. Do not touch it."

"Eh?" Dido looked sharply behind her. Nobody was there. "Have I got a screw loose?" she wondered, and approached the knife blade to the crack once more.

Again she heard the voice, distant but distinct, impossible to locate, like the drone of a loud mosquito:

"This is a hoodoo lock. Beware. Do not touch it."

"Rabbit me!" Dido, thoroughly discomposed and uneasy, stepped back, eying the door as if it might fly open and thump her. "This is a right mirksy set-out! Talking doors—I spose when I goes to lay hands on the basket of grub it'll get up and walk away! Well, the old crone may have hoodoo'd her front door, but I'll lay she didn't think to set one o' her spooky booby traps in the attic—blow me if I don't fetch the vittles out that way just to serve her right for her nasty suspicious nature."

Somewhat to the surprise of the Captain she returned to his room, piled up their luggage, and climbed into the loft. Then she made her way along through the series of lofts until she reached that of Mrs. Lubbage, whose trap door was open. Jamming a broomstick across the hole, Dido tied a length of cord to it, and slid down.

Mrs. Lubbage's kitchen smelt even worse with the door shut; the smell was like a solid, threatening presence in the room.

Just our luck if it's turned the grub sour, Dido thought, moving carefully and warily across the greasy bricks toward the table on which stood the hamper of provisions. A label on the handle reinforced her courage: it said in large clear print:

FOR THE SICK GENTLEMAN
AT DOGKENNEL COTTAGES

Bet we wouldn't a-seen a crumb of it if I hadn't come to fetch it, Dido thought, grasping the handle. Next moment, with a startled gasp, she almost dropped the whole supply on the bricks for, sitting on the table close by and revealed when she picked the basket up, was the largest rat she had ever seen, brindled, with a tail that must have been fully two feet long. It did not scurry away, as an ordinary rat would have done, but turned its head slowly and gave her a steady look; Dido felt a cold sensation between her shoulderblades.

However she returned the look boldly.

"You'll know me again, Frederick, that's for sure," she said to it. "And I just hope you've kept your long whiskery nose out o' the Cap'n's cheese. Now, how'm I going to get yon basket up the rope?"

She solved this problem by attaching the basket to the end of the rope and pulling it up after her; watched, meanwhile, by the rat, "as if," thought Dido, "he was learning how so he could do it himself next time."

The rat was not the only creature that seemed to be watching her; she noticed, in a corner of Mrs. Lubbage's kitchen, a small carved wooden table exactly like the one she had seen at Tegleaze Manor, with little black faces and white-painted eyes that seemed to follow her.

"If I never go back into that boggarty place again it'll be soon enough," she thought, scrambling back into her own loft; "blest if I know how Cris can stand living there. No wonder he seems a bit out o' the common.

"Anyways, we got the grub."

She lowered it down into Captain Hughes's sickroom, jumped down herself, and unpacked the hamper with exclamations of satisfaction.

"Bread—butter—cold roast chicken—flask o' soup—cheese—red currant jelly—grapes—oranges—and a bottle o' wine. Couldn't a done you better if you'd been Admiral o' the Fleet," she told the Captain, and proceeded to heat up some of the soup for him and toast some of the bread.

"I've poured in a dram o' wine as well, so it's right stin-go stuff," she said, giving him a bowlful. She herself ate an orange and a leg of chicken to hearten her for the scene which she felt certain must follow Mrs. Lubbage's return and discovery that the basket was missing.

Sure enough, at about sunset there was a tremendous thump on the door.

"Hush! You'll wake the Cap'n!" Dido hissed, opening it.

Outside stood Mrs. Lubbage, brawny arms akimbo, little black eyes snapping with rage.

"Evening, missus," Dido greeted her politely, slipping out and closing the door. "Guess you was wanting to ask about the basket o' prog Lady Tegleaze sent down for us. Cap'n Hughes was fair clemmed wi' hunger, and you hadn't left word when you'd be back, so I jist nipped along and helped myself—hope that was all hunky-dory."

The witch stared at her for a moment, started to say something, and then changed her mind.

"How did you get in?" she asked at length, in a surly tone.

Dido could not mention the loft, because of Cris, so she opened her eyes wide and innocently replied,

"Why, how d'you think? Down the chimbley?"

Mrs. Lubbage seemed annoyed but baffled by this answer and was about to ask another question; luckily at that moment a distant bleating, which had been drawing closer, became so loud that no further conversation was possible; Mr. Firkin had arrived home with his flock. Mrs. Lubbage stumped off angrily to her own cottage; Dido ran to help Mr. Firkin and Toby persuade the sheep to file through a gap between two hurdles and so into the pasture at the rear of the farmyard.

As they passed through the gap, Mr. Firkin touched each sheep with his white crook, and Dido could hear him counting,

"Yan, Tan, Tethera, Methera, Pip—"

Each time he came to Den he moved his hand down the crook, which had notches in it.

"Mr. Firkin," said Dido, when the sheep were all safe in the field, and she was scrubbing potatoes in the old man's kitchen, and setting them to bake among the glowing logs in his fireplace.

"Yes, darter?"

"What was that you were saying when you counted the sheep?"

"I was a-counting of them, darter."

"Yes, but what were those words—Yan, Tan, Tethera—"

"That be ship-counting lingo. Lingo for counting ship," Mr. Firkin explained kindly.

"Oh, cranberries! We're a-going round like a merry-go-round! Well, suppose I was to meet some chaps as called 'emselves Yan, Tan, and so forth; I'm not saying I did, but suppose I was to—"

Mr. Firkin's old brown face took on a cautious expression.

"Nay, I'd say let well alone, darter. Mebbe 'tis all talk but I've heard tell as how there be folk called Wineberry Men as 'tis best not to meddle with."

"Smugglers, maybe?"

"Hush! Nay, more like kind o' civil service gentry," Mr. Firkin said hastily. "Best not to talk about 'em, darter. Wallses do have earses."

Deciding that the Wineberry Men almost certainly were smugglers, Dido returned to Captain Hughes and found him wakeful and fidgety.

"What about our Dispatch?" he demanded. "Do you have it safe, child?"

"Yes, yes, Cap'n. All rug. Right here." Dido tapped her chest, which crackled reassuringly.

"We must get it to London somehow," the Captain fretted. "What day is it today?"

"Fust o' November, Cap. All Saints' Day."

"And the coronation next week! It is desperately important that the Dispatch should reach the First Lord before then."

"Doc says you mustn't be moved afore two weeks," Dido pointed out.

"Then we must find a reliable messenger."

Dido bit her thumb. "I knows that," she said gloomily. "But trying to find a reliable cove in these parts is about as likely as picking up a pink pearl in Piccadilly. Everyone's up to the neck in summat. There's a carrier called Jem; today's his day to call, seemingly; but Mr. Firkin says he's shravey. Best not give him the Dispatch. What I thought I might do, Cap, if you're agreeable, is send a note by Jem to a cove I knows in London asking him to step down and help us."

"Is your friend reliable?" the Captain asked, pressing a hand to his aching head.

"Sure as a gun, he is!"

Since Captain Hughes, who was beginning to feel weak and feverish again, could think of no better plan, he agreed to this.

Dido sat down to the unaccustomed task of writing a letter. Borrowing the Captain's traveling inkhorn and quill, using a bit of paper the cheese had been wrapped in, she wrote:

"Dere Simon. I doo hop yore stil alive. I am all rug—wuz piked up by wailing ship an hadd Grate Times abord her. Brung home in Man o' War like Roilty. Wil tel more wen I see yoo. I do hop yore stil alive. Iff yoo can pleez cum hear wear I am stuk at preznt or send relleye relible cove. I badly need sum wun. I doo hop yore stil alive. Lots ov luv. Dido."

She folded it and addressed it: "Simon as used to livv in Rose Alley, Care of Doc Furniss, The art Skool, Chellsey, London."

She had scarcely finished this when voices were heard outside, there came a knock on the door, and Mr. Firkin ushered in a lank, greasy-haired individual in a moleskin cap and gaiters.

"This yer's Jem Mugridge, as'll take your letter to Perroth, darter."

One glance at him was enough to make Dido thankful she had not planned to entrust Captain Hughes's Dispatch to the shravey Jem; he looked about as reliable as a stoat.

"That'll be five-and-a-tanner," he said, receiving the letter, his little pink-rimmed eyes meanwhile darting into every corner of the room.

Dido was fairly sure that a letter to London should not cost so much, but Captain Hughes counted five shillings and sixpence out of a purse which he brought from under his pillow, Jem's eyes following every movement and every coin.

"I thankee sir and missie. That'll be in Pet'orth by breakfast time."

"So I should hope, if Petworth is but five miles distant," the Captain remarked testily.

When Jem had departed on his flea-bitten mare, Dido asked the Captain if he would have any objection to her stepping up the road to Tegleaze Manor.

"There's a cove there as asked to see me, and it seems only civil to go, seeing they sent us the basket o' prog. Mebbe I'll find someone as we can trust there; you never can tell."

Captain Hughes agreed to this; but since he seemed rather low-spirited at the prospect of being left alone, Mr. Firkin was easily persuaded to come and keep him company. Mr. Firkin's brother, it turned out, had been a seafaring man and a great singer; the two men were soon absorbed in discussing sea shanties and comparing tunes. Leaving them to it, Dido slipped off.

As she left the cottage some animal scuttled away, quick and quiet, along the wall. It might have been a rabbit or a large rat.

"I'll be glad when we can shift out o' this hurrah's nest," she thought with a shiver. "You gets the notion someone's everlastingly a-peering over your shoulder."

However, nothing else seemed to be stirring in the cold, moonshiny night. She walked up the beech avenue toward the Manor, turned right at the top as instructed, and found herself on the edge of an enormous sunk lawn.

"Guess this must be the tilting-yard," Dido thought. "The sides is tilted, anyhows; it's like a dripping pan." She scrambled down the steep grassy slope and walked across turf that was silver with icy dew. Black yew trees, once clipped to resemble giant pineapples, but, from neglect, grown into many strange shapes, were placed about the lawn in pairs, like sentries. Dido slipped from one pair of shadows to the next and ran softly up a flight of steps toward the house. She passed along a terrace above the lawn, through a wicket gate, through a small walled garden, and so came to a side door, half hidden under a great vine. While she was wondering whether to knock, the door opened.

"Hallo! I saw you come up the steps. Make haste—after me. Isn't this capital!" breathed Sir Tobit. Dido felt her hand taken; she was pulled into the dark; the door shut quietly behind her. She allowed herself to be led up a narrow flight of stairs, along a passage, and so presently found herself in the room where she had been before. It was just as dusty and untidy as it had been on the previous evening.

"Now we can talk," said Sir Tobit, throwing himself comfortably in a chair. "Grandmother is in bed with one of her headaches, so she won't trouble us."

"Talk, what about?"

"You can tell me your adventures. I've read all my books. So the only way I can amuse myself now is to make up stories—and that's very boring because I know what the end is going to be. Well, go on—begin!"

Dido was not eager. However she felt some sympathy for Sir Tobit's solitude and boredom, so she obliged with a brief account of how she had been shipwrecked, picked up by a whaler and carried to Nantucket, and brought home by his majesty's sloop Thrush.

"And I must let someone in London know that Cap'n Hughes is stuck here with a broken gam," she finished. "I've sent a letter to a pal o' mine, but I don't trust that carrier Jem above half; is there any reliable cove you can suggest?"

"There aren't many men left on the estate," Tobit said. "We're so poor, everyone has left, except Frill and Pelmett, and I wouldn't trust them."

"Poor? In a place this size?" Dido was surprised.

"You see, Grandmother has a great fondness for betting on the horses. When she was a girl she loved riding; then she was thrown and broke her leg. So now as she can't ride, she bets instead; since I've been living here I believe she has gambled away, oh, hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yesterday she gave FitzPickwick her last diamond ring to sell. That's why I have to wear these clothes; we can't afford to buy new ones. But luckily there are lots of old ones about the house."

"How long have you lived here, then?"

"Oh, ever since I was a baby. I was born in the West Indies, on Tiburon Island; we have—used to have— estates there. Papa and Mamma lived there, but they were killed in a hurricane, so Tante Sannie brought me here. I don't remember that. Sannie didn't know what it would be like here; she's homesick, but there isn't enough money to send her back." He spoke indifferently, but Dido felt that, since he was lonely himself, he ought to have more sympathy for the old woman's plight, stuck here in this great dusty cold house, so far from her own warm island.

"I'd better be getting back." She prowled restlessly about the untidy, shadowy room. "Is that you?"

A picture on the wall showed three children, dressed in clothes such as Tobit wore. The boy in the middle, holding hands of the other two, who stood slightly behind him, might have been Tobit at a younger age.

"No, that's three ancestors—two brothers and a sister who lived in Charles the First's time. They were triplets—all the same age."

"It'd be grand to be a triplet—you'd never be lonely then," Dido said, studying them with some envy. "What happened to them?"

"They quarreled," Tobit said coolly. "One fought on the king's side, one on Cromwell's, and the third one went overseas and vanished. The other two lost all their money in the Civil War, so ever since then triplets have been thought unlucky in our family."

"Have there been many more?"

"No, none; but we've had bad luck just the same ... Come along; I'll show you Cousin Wilfred's dolls' house."

He pulled the reluctant Dido—croopus, dolls' houses at his age! she thought—out of the room, along passages and downstairs into the main hall—empty tonight; and through an open door into a small room at one side of it.

"Come on—old Wilfred isn't here, he's playing tiddlywinks with Sawbones Subito. Look—isn't it queer!"

Cousin Wilfred's room was as shabby as Tobit's, but in a different way. The furniture here was old, and had once been handsome, but was now falling to bits: the wood was worm-eaten, the satin upholstery faded and torn. Only the dolls' house looked well-cared-for. It was a faithful copy of Tegleaze Manor, beautifully made, furnished to the last detail with curtains, carpets, plates on the tables, pictures on the walls, even a carriage in the stables. There were no dolls, but tiny suits of clothes like Tobit's hung in the closets.

"He made it all himself, from old prints of the house as it used to be," Tobit said, carelessly throwing open the front.

"Even the pictures?"

These were oval miniatures, carefully framed, no bigger than postage stamps.

"No, those are real. Some ancestor collected them. Some of them were quite valuable, but Grandmother sold those—all except one, which isn't here. She'd like to sell that, but it belongs to me—or will when I come of age."

"When's that?"

"Next week—on my fourteenth birthday."

"Where's the picture now?"

"At the lawyers'—they don't trust her. Come on." Tobit was restless—nothing seemed to interest him for long. He moved to the window. Dido took a last look at the nursery with its three white-spread beds, box of tiny toys, hoop leaning against the wall, and dappled rocking-horse which might just have stopped swaying, as if three children had rushed out of the room, slammed the door, and gone their different ways.

"Hey!" whispered Tobit. "Look!"

He beckoned Dido to the window. They were looking out on the moonlit tilting-yard. Two figures paced across it and vanished into the shade of a pair of yew trees.

"It's old FitzPickwick—wonder what he's doing here at this time of night. And who is that he's talking to? Tell you what—let's go out and stalk 'em, that'd be famous fun. Wait, have I got my peashooter on me?"

Tobit rummaged in his black velvet pockets.

"I druther have a word with your butler—is he anywheres about?" Dido said, impatient at the prospect of such a childish sport.

"Gusset? Why? Anyhow, you can't, it's his evening off; he goes to see his son. Ah, two shooters and lots of peas. Here, have one." He thrust a slender pipe into her hand and poured into the pocket of her duffel jacket what felt like about a pound of heavy little dry objects.

"Ain't we a bit old for sich goings-on?"

"What else is there to do in this moldering barracks—except make up stories? I'm a dead shot," he boasted. "With a sling I can hit a hare at a hundred yards. Only there aren't any hares. Oh, do come along."

"What's that?" Dido asked, as they passed a large chart on the wall.

"Family tree—all the way back to the Saxons." He pulled her along yet another dark passage.

"Who's old FitzPickwick?"

"Our bailiff—he's a toffee-nosed sort of fellow. It's my belief he's feathered his nest handsomely out of Tegleaze Manor," Tobit said, sounding all of a sudden surprisingly shrewd. "He sells Grandmother's jewelry for her, and places her bets."

"Doesn't give her very good advice, if she always loses."

"Hush!"

They had come out into a brick-paved stable-yard, like that of the dolls' house. A gate and a flagged path brought them back to the terrace overlooking the tilting-yard.

"When Jamie Three had his coronation," Tobit muttered discontentedly, leading Dido down the steps and along in the shadow of the high yew hedge that bordered the lawn, "Granny and Grandpa had a pageant here, with champagne and roast peacock for all the tenants. But now there are hardly any tenants, and no cash—not even enough for me to go up to London to see the coronation."

"Would your gran let you?" Dido asked. "I thought she was so set agin your going out in case you catch summat nasty?"

"Oh, she won't care what happens to me once I come of age—and my birthday's before the coronation—I'm fourteen on Monday, the coronation's on Wednesday, I daresay you didn't know, just home from sea? Old Jamie Three died, and now it's going to be his son. He's always been called Prince Davie but he's going to be Richard the Fourth. And there's going to be fireworks on Ludgate Hill, and oxes roasted in Stuart Square, and processions, and all sorts of high jinks—don't I just wish I was going."

Mention of the coronation reminded Dido of her own worries. "If Gusset isn't here I guess I'll be going, back to Dog kennel," she said. "Please to thank your gran for the prog."

"The what?"

"The grub—the basket o' vittles."

"Oh, she won't have sent anything—far too mean. No, if some food came, I daresay Gusset sent it. Hush—there they are!"

He dragged Dido into an alcove in the yew hedge, where they lurked in the shadow.

Low voices gradually became audible as the two men paced across the immense lawn.

"Oh, I won't expose your little g-games—don't think it, my dear f-fellow. It's n-nothing to me, believe me, if you've pocketed a rent roll as long as the M-Mississippi River. Money is of s-small interest to me."

The speaker's voice had a curiously deep, grating quality, broken by his occasional stammer.

"What is, then?"

"That's old Colonel FitzP," whispered Tobit in Dido's ear. "But I'm blest if I know who the other one is."

"The name! The place! You d-don't understand what it means—when one has s-spent all one's life in a lumber camp as n-nobody—Miles Tuggles—pah! To change that I'd commit any c—any crime. As to your peccadilloes—what's the old lady to me? Or the b-brat either? I give you my word, my research into your d-dealings was solely to effect an introduction so that we could meet on equal t-terms—"

"I wonder?" Colonel FitzPickwick's soft mutter was overheard only by the two eavesdroppers.

"But harkee now," the first man went on. "I hold you in a cleft stick. I know so much, I promise you I could c-cook your goose with six words, dropped in the right quarter. S-so it is in your interest to help me. I n-need a pretext for remaining in the neighborhood—"

The two men moved away. The word "puppets" was all that Dido could catch of the next remark.

"Puppets!" muttered Tobit discontentedly. "Old FitzPickwick's mad about puppets; they're his hobby. He's always boring on about them."

"—be a first-rate cover," FitzPickwick was saying, when the two men next strolled in the direction of the watchers.

"That will do. Now tell me the rest—you have n-no choice. This Godwit you mention—"

They turned and paced away again.

"Let's go after them!" breathed Tobit, and tweaked Dido's hand; the two listeners slipped from their hiding place and crossed to the shadow of a pair of yews.

"—rollers," they heard Colonel FitzPickwick say. "They are fixed already. And the diamond will pay for half. But the rest of the money—" The two men passed behind a tree and their words were lost. "—still to come," the Colonel was saying when they reappeared. "If Lady Tegleaze—" another pair of trees cut off his words—"certain His Highness Prince George would lend a favorable ear to your claim."

"Rot it, so I should hope! But as to these rollers—" the stammering man was beginning, when Dido heard a soft hiss beside her, a phtt! and Colonel FitzPickwick raised a hand to his cheek.

"Strange! I could have sworn I felt a hailstone. Yet there's not a cloud in the sky."

"Oh, famous!" Tobit breathed in Dido's ear. "I got him fair and square."

"'Twas a m-mosquito, I daresay. Rollers, now: rollers are all very fine. But where's your motive power?"

"A mosquito? You forget you are in England in November, my dear sir. If the weather's breaking I must be off. My mare's a thoroughbred—she has an aversion to hail."

"You shoot now!" whispered Tobit. "'Go on—I dare you!"

"I druther listen," Dido muttered crossly. "Hush! I've a notion—"

"Motive power yet remains to be found. Godwit thinks a system of levers. Now, if humans were as easily moved as my mannikins—Devil take it! That was certainly a hailstone. It hit me on the ear."

Tobit was suffocating with suppressed laughter.

"Got the old windbag again. Him and his mannikins!"

Colonel FitzPickwick turned and walked off decisively, his companion following with reluctance, turning back for many glances at the house.

The shadows of the two men followed them like long black-velvet trains.

"Now we ain't sure what it was all about," Dido complained when they were out of earshot.

"Oh, pho, what does it matter? Just old Pickwick's usual hocus-pocus about puppets."

"But it seemed to be about your grandmother and this place."

"What do I care about this place? As soon as I'm of age I shall run off to sea and turn pirate. Yo, ho, ho, and the jolly black flag," said Sir Tobit, and aimed a broadside of peas into the yew tree. "Come on, we'll spy on old Wilfred and the sawbones." He tugged Dido at a run along the yew hedge, up the steps, and around the end of the house. They looked through a window into a small room where, by the light of one dim candle, two men were crouched over a tiddlywinks board. Dido recognized the doctor; the other was a little tiny gray-haired old fellow like a water rat in a velvet robe and nightcap.

"Pity the window's shut," Tobit muttered. "I'd like to give old Wilfred a fright, in return for all the games of tiddlywinks he's bored me with. D'you dare me to break the window?"

"O' course not! What a mutton-headed notion."

Dido, becoming more and more impatient, was about to take her leave, when a sudden fierce whisper from behind startled them both.

"Bad, bad boy! What you doing, what you about?"

Like a black, angry dragonfly the tiny figure of Tante Sannie darted from a patch of shadow, hissing reproaches at To bit.

"You not allowed out after darkfall, you know that! Spose a memory bird hear you, spose the Night Lady catch you in her claws?"

"Oh, stuff. Don't talk such nonsense, Sannie," Tobit said, but he glanced behind him uneasily, then put a couple of peas in his mouth. "Anyway, I'll be of age next week and can do as I please!"

"Also, who is this?" Sannie peered up at Dido. Over the black-and-white draperies muffling the lower part of the old woman's face, her tiny eyes glittered like the points of nails. "Hah! I know you! You little bad sickness girl, Sir Tobit not allowed to play with you. Lady Tegleaze be very angry when she hear."

"We weren't playing," Sir Tobit said sulkily. "I was showing her the grounds by moonlight."

"Don't you false-talk me, boy! What this?" Sannie twitched the peashooter from his hand. "Ho! You be of age next week, be you? You got no more sense than baby picknie. Out after darkfall, shooting Joobie nuts! Spose hit somebody in him eye, sent to prison? Then you never come of age, you know that!"

"Oh, fiddle. Nobody gets sent to prison for shooting with a peashooter. I shall shoot as many as I like." Rebelliously he snatched back the tube and blew a pea at the window. It bounced off the glass with an audible ping, but the two men inside, absorbed in their game, never even lifted their heads.

"Oh, so brave little feller!" Sannie's tone became silky as syrup. "So brave to shoot Joobie nuts. But don't you dare swallow nut!"

"I'll do that too, if I want!" He swallowed the two nuts he was sucking, eying the old woman with defiance. But almost at once a curious change came over his face. He glanced behind him again, twice, and gave a violent shiver.

"Is cold, my little thingling? Is hearing some noise in bushes, memory bird, maybe?"

Tobit shivered again, glancing about with dread.

"Come along then, come in quick before the Night Lady fly over. Come along, little thingling. Old Sannie make you cup of thistle tea."

She took his hand and led him off; Tobit followed meekly.

"Croopus!" muttered Dido, when they were out of sight.

She was so startled by the change in Tobit that she remained where she was for several minutes, pondering. "It was those peas—Joobie nuts, or whatever she called them. What the blazes can they be?"

She pulled a handful of the heavy little dry things from her duffel pocket and eyed them suspiciously. In the moonlight they looked gray, wrinkled, harmless enough; about the size of nasturtium seeds; they felt faintly gritty, as if they had been dusted with salt. Warily Dido tried one with the tip of her tongue. It did taste salty. She spat, and glanced behind her, suddenly overcome with an almost irresistible urge to duck: it seemed as if she could hear the whizz of giant wings overhead. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw a huge shadow flit over the moonlit grass. But when she turned and looked there was nothing.

"Shiver my timbers!" She stared again at the peas in her hand; was about to throw them on the ground; but in the end, tipped them back into her pocket and ran fast and quietly away from the house. Suddenly the night seemed full of noises: a cold, liquid call, some bird maybe; a soft drumming tick; a rattle—or was it a chuckle?—coming from the yew hedge. Dido darted across the tilting-lawn, where the pairs of yew trees seemed to be shifting just a little, changing their positions after she passed them; she did not look back but had the notion that they were moving together behind her, perhaps coming after her, as in the game Grandmother's Footsteps.

"Rabbit me if I ever taste another o' them perishing Joobie nuts," Dido muttered. "No wonder Tobit and his granny both seem a bit totty-headed, if they keep a-chawing o' the nasty little things."

Ahead of her now lay the beech avenue, with its bands of moonlight and shade. She felt some reluctance to go down it, but shook herself angrily and ran on at top speed. Then, coming toward her, she saw a black figure. It seemed to vary in size—wavered—grew tall—shrank again.

Dido gulped.

"This here's nothing but a load o' foolishness," she told herself, and went on firmly. The figure seemed now to have no head and three legs. But of course when she came closer she saw that it was merely old Gusset, hobbling back from his evening off, wearing a sack over his head, helping himself along with a stick.

"Hey there, Mister Gusset!" Dido greeted him warmly when they were within speaking distance. "I'm tickled I didn't miss you—wanted to say thanks again for the basket o' vittles—Tobit said as how likely you'd sent 'em your own self."

"Oh, no trouble, missie." The butler seemed embarrassed. "Glad to do it for the poor sick gennleman—I heeard tell as how he's a naval captain? And you've been a - visiting Mas'r Tobit, have you, missie? That's good, that is—he can do with a bit o' young company."

"That he can," Dido agreed. "Ask me, he has his head in the clouds most o' the time, he's got some right corkbrained notions. And that old witch as sees arter him—Sannie or whatever she calls herself—it's a plaguy shame she couldn't be shipped back to Thingummy Island, her and her Joobie nuts."

Gusset glanced around him warily. "You're right there, missie," he said, sinking his voice.

"What are those Joobie nuts, anyways?"

"Summat she brought with her from Tiburon, Missie Twido. She grows 'em from seed, up where the old asparagus bed used to be. She alius has a plenty of 'em. Don't you go a-swallowing they hampery things, missie—they'll give you the hot chills, don't they give you wuss."

"What happens when Tobit comes of age next week?"

"Why, nothing much, missie. I reckon things'll goo on pretty much as usual."

"He doesn't come into any cash, so's he could go off to school?"

"No, missie. Only the heirloom."

"What's the heirloom?" Gusset had spoken as if everyone would know of it.

"It be a liddle painting, Missie Dwite. Only small, smaller than the palm of your liddle hand, but it be painted on ivory, and I've heeard tell as it be worth thousands and thousands—enough to put everything to rights round here."

"Fancy! What's it of?" Dido asked curiously.

"'Tis a picture o' the Tower of Babel, missie. 'Tis painted by a famous painter, I've heeard tell. Anybody can see it—they keeps it at Perrorth, at the lawyers', a-set in a glass case in the wall."

Mention of Petworth recalled Dido to her own problems.

"Mister Gusset, I've got to get a message to London, urgent. How can I send it? I gave a letter to that Jem, but he don't look reliable to me."

"Jem Mugridge, missie? No, he ain't noways reliable."

"Well, then, what'd I best do? The message has to get to London before the—before the end o' next week."

"Best to goo yourself, missie."

"But I didn't oughta leave Cap'n Hughes while he's sick."

Gusset pushed back the sack in order to scratch his white head. He reflected.

"Well, missie," he said at length. "There's some chaps I know as gooes up and down to London regular. Trading chaps they be. Some mightn't say as how they was reliable, but I speak as I find, and I've alius found 'em trustable."

"D'you reckon they'd help me, mister?"

"I'd hatta ask," Gusset said cautiously. "I couldn't promise, see?"

"When will you see them?"

Gusset seemed unwilling to commit himself, but said he'd see them by Friday, maybe, and would try to let Dido know on that day.

"Now I'd best be getting in, missie. 'Tis turble late."

"Good night, then, Mister Gusset, and thanks."

The old man hobbled off, and Dido ran on down the avenue toward Dogkennel Cottages. Her talk with Gusset had cheered her and the queer visions and sounds that had troubled her before seemed to have died away; she whistled as she ran, and jumped over patches of shadow in the chalk cartway. But just this side of the cottages she came to an abrupt stop. Something—surely it was a dragon?—lay on the weedy grass in front of the little row of houses. Its eyes glittered. When it saw Dido it stretched slightly, and spread out its wings.

Dido bit her thumb, hard. Then she stooped, picked up a sizable chunk of flint from the track, and hurled it at the monster, which broke into about seven different sections. Three of them were sheep, which trotted nervously away. Two or three more were chickens, flapping and flustered. One, which might have been a rat, scurried into the shadow of Mrs. Lubbage's cottage.

Mrs. Lubbage herself was sitting by her door on a broken-backed chair, gazing, apparently, into a pail of water.

"Evening, missus," Dido said civilly as she passed.

The wise woman lifted her head and gave Dido a long, expressionless stare. But she said nothing.

"Utchy old besom," Dido thought, taking her key from under a stone, where Mr. Firkin had left it. "Anyone can tell as manners weren't thought much of where you was reared!"

Rather more clumsily than usual, she fitted the key into the lock.

And all the time, as she turned it, opened the door, and let herself in, she could feel Mrs. Lubbage's malevolent stare boring into her shoulder blades.