e only protector
Elsie had got, and though she was mad with me just at that moment, it
made no difference. Besides I had got an idea--I did not get them
often, and so hung on the tighter to those I did find. And this one
had really been forced upon me. It was that somehow Elsie was the key
to all the mysteries, and that through her would come the solution of
everything we had been trying to find out. Also--though this I would
not for the life of me have mentioned to Elsie herself--that some peril
hung imminent over her, and of this I should soon have proof if I
wanted any.

Now it is curious how different both things and people look when you
are watching them--as it were unbeknown. It is something like looking
through between your legs at a landscape. You see the colours
brighter, naturally, and as for the people--none of them do anything
unless as if with some horrid secret purpose. When Mr. Mustard wiped
his brow with a spotted handkerchief, or knocked a fly off the end of
his nose, I was lost in wonderment what he meant by it. When he called
Elsie to come down for her own private lessons in the big school-house,
I watched carefully to see that he had not a weapon concealed under his
rusty coat tails. I suppose policemen and detectives get used to this
sort of thing, but certainly I never did.

Then I had always thought that we all started for school together. We
seemed to. But Mr. Mustard's scholars certainly didn't--and I suppose
schools all over the world are the same. Nobody came alone. If they
started from home by themselves, they yelled and signalled till they
were joined by somebody else. Only a few groups arrived by the road,
generally hand-in-hand if they were girls, and the boys with their arms
about each other's waists. Most, however, ducked through hedges,
clambered over stone dykes, crossed ditches by planks, and so finally
got to school over broken-down pieces of wire fencing, or by edging
themselves between the gate post and the wall. I remember now that I
had generally done the same thing myself. But I never knew it till
that day I lay on the old willow, watching Mr. Mustard's school
gathering for morning lessons.

Seen from a distance Mr. Mustard was a youngish-looking man, getting
bald, however, except about his ears. He wore a perfect delta of
wrinkles at the corner of each eye. He was teaching Elsie about half
an hour, and during this time, his sister looked in twice from the