ightened way.

'Now,' said Robert quickly; 'I'll drop first.'

He hung by his hands and dropped through the trap-door.

'Now you. Hang by your hands. I'll catch you. Oh, there's no time for
jaw. Drop, I say.'

Jane dropped.

Robert tried to catch her, and even before they had finished the
breathless roll among the piles of clothes, which was what his catching
ended in, he whispered--

'We'll hide--behind those fenders and things; they'll think we've gone
along the roofs. Then, when all is calm, we'll creep down the stairs and
take our chance.'

They hastily hid. A corner of an iron bedstead stuck into Robert's side,
and Jane had only standing room for one foot--but they bore it--and when
the lady came back, not with Septimus, but with another lady, they held
their breath and their hearts beat thickly.

'Gone!' said the first lady; 'poor little things--quite mad, my
dear--and at large! We must lock this room and send for the police.'

'Let me look out,' said the second lady, who was, if possible, older
and thinner and primmer than the first. So the two ladies dragged a box
under the trap-door and put another box on the top of it, and then they
both climbed up very carefully and put their two trim, tidy heads out of
the trap-door to look for the 'mad children'.

'Now,' whispered Robert, getting the bedstead leg out of his side.

They managed to creep out from their hiding-place and out through the
door before the two ladies had done looking out of the trap-door on to
the empty leads.

Robert and Jane tiptoed down the stairs--one flight, two flights. Then
they looked over the banisters. Horror! a servant was coming up with a
loaded scuttle.

The children with one consent crept swiftly through the first open door.

The room was a study, calm and gentlemanly, with rows of books, a
writing table, and a pair of embroidered slippers warming themselves in
the fender. The children hid behind the window-curtains. As they passed
the table they saw on it a missionary-box with its bottom label torn
off, open and empty.

'Oh, how awful!' whispered Jane. 'We shall never get away alive.'

'Hush!' said Robert, not a moment too soon, for there were steps on the
stairs, and next instant the two ladies came into the room. They did not
see the children, but they saw the empty missionary box.

'I knew it,' said one. 'Selina, it WAS a gang. I was certain of it from
the first. The children were not mad. They were sent to di