burglar--and he was certainly moved by her remarks--'I
see you're in a hole--and I don't mind lending a helping 'and. I don't
ask 'ow you come by them. But I've got a pal--'e's a mark on cats. I'll
fetch him along, and if he thinks they'd fetch anything above their
skins I don't mind doin' you a kindness.'

'You won't go away and never come back,' said Jane, 'because I don't
think I COULD bear that.'

The burglar, quite touched by her emotion, swore sentimentally that,
alive or dead, he would come back.

Then he went, and Cyril and Robert sent the girls to bed and sat up to
wait for his return. It soon seemed absurd to await him in a state
of wakefulness, but his stealthy tap on the window awoke them readily
enough. For he did return, with the pal and the barrow and the sacks.
The pal approved of the cats, now dormant in Persian repletion, and
they were bundled into the sacks, and taken away on the barrow--mewing,
indeed, but with mews too sleepy to attract public attention.

'I'm a fence--that's what I am,' said the burglar gloomily. 'I never
thought I'd come down to this, and all acause er my kind 'eart.'

Cyril knew that a fence is a receiver of stolen goods, and he replied
briskly--

'I give you my sacred the cats aren't stolen. What do you make the
time?'

'I ain't got the time on me,' said the pal--'but it was just about
chucking-out time as I come by the "Bull and Gate". I shouldn't wonder
if it was nigh upon one now.'

When the cats had been removed, and the boys and the burglar had parted
with warm expressions of friendship, there remained only the cow.

'She must stay all night,' said Robert. 'Cook'll have a fit when she
sees her.'

'All night?' said Cyril. 'Why--it's tomorrow morning if it's one. We can
have another wish!'

So the carpet was urged, in a hastily written note, to remove the cow to
wherever she belonged, and to return to its proper place on the nursery
floor. But the cow could not be got to move on to the carpet. So Robert
got the clothes line out of the back kitchen, and tied one end very
firmly to the cow's horns, and the other end to a bunched-up corner of
the carpet, and said 'Fire away.'

And the carpet and cow vanished together, and the boys went to bed,
tired out and only too thankful that the evening at last was over.

Next morning the carpet lay calmly in its place, but one corner was very
badly torn. It was the corner that the cow had been tied on to.

CHAPTER 9.