which these kids'll tell you the same, and I'd like to 'ave the
pleasure of walkin' out with you next Sunday.'

'Lor!' said the queen cook, ''ow sudden you are, mister.'

'Walking out means you're going to be married,' said Anthea. 'Why not
get married and have done with it? _I_ would.'

'I don't mind if I do,' said the burglar. But the cook said--

'No, miss. Not me, not even in a dream. I don't say anythink ag'in the
young chap's looks, but I always swore I'd be married in church, if at
all--and, anyway, I don't believe these here savages would know how
to keep a registering office, even if I was to show them. No, mister,
thanking you kindly, if you can't bring a clergyman into the dream I'll
live and die like what I am.'

'Will you marry her if we get a clergyman?' asked the match-making
Anthea.

'I'm agreeable, miss, I'm sure,' said he, pulling his wreath straight.
''Ow this 'ere bokay do tiddle a chap's ears to be sure!'

So, very hurriedly, the carpet was spread out, and instructed to fetch
a clergyman. The instructions were written on the inside of Cyril's cap
with a piece of billiard chalk Robert had got from the marker at the
hotel at Lyndhurst. The carpet disappeared, and more quickly than you
would have thought possible it came back, bearing on its bosom the
Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop.

The Reverend Septimus was rather a nice young man, but very much mazed
and muddled, because when he saw a strange carpet laid out at his feet,
in his own study, he naturally walked on it to examine it more closely.
And he happened to stand on one of the thin places that Jane and Anthea
had darned, so that he was half on wishing carpet and half on plain
Scotch heather-mixture fingering, which has no magic properties at all.

The effect of this was that he was only half there--so that the children
could just see through him, as though he had been a ghost. And as for
him, he saw the sunny southern shore, the cook and the burglar and the
children quite plainly; but through them all he saw, quite plainly also,
his study at home, with the books and the pictures and the marble clock
that had been presented to him when he left his last situation.

He seemed to himself to be in a sort of insane fit, so that it did not
matter what he did--and he married the burglar to the cook. The cook
said that she would rather have had a solider kind of a clergyman, one
that you couldn't see through so plain, but perhaps this was real eno