zabeth and proclaim
her Queen, and the rest were to blow the Houses of Parliament up when
the King went to open them."

"I never heard this tale from my tutor," said Dickie. And without
knowing why he felt uneasy, and because he felt uneasy he laughed. Then
he said, "Proceed, cousin."

Elfrida went on telling him about the Gunpowder Plot, but he hardly
listened. The stopped-clock feeling was growing so strong. But he heard
her say, "Mr. Tresham wrote to his relation, Lord Monteagle, that they
were going to blow up the King," and he found himself saying, "What
King?" though he knew the answer perfectly well.

"Why, King James the First," said Elfrida, and suddenly the horrible
tutor pounced and got Elfrida by the wrist. Then all in a moment
everything grew confused. Mr. Parados was asking questions and little
Elfrida was trying to answer them, and Dickie understood that the
Gunpowder Plot _had not happened y_et, and that Elfrida had given the
whole show away. How did she know? And the verse?

"Tell me all--every name, every particular," the loathsome tutor was
saying, "or it will be the worse for thee and thy father."

Elfrida was positively green with terror, and looked appealingly at
Dickie.

"Come, sir," he said, in as manly a voice as he could manage, "you
frighten my cousin. It is but a tale she told. She is always merry and
full of many inventions."

But the tutor would not be silenced.

"And it's in history," he heard Elfrida say.

What followed was a mist of horrible things. When the mist cleared
Dickie found himself alone in the house with Mr. Parados, the nurse, and
the servants, for the Earl and Countess of Arden, Edred, and Elfrida
were lodged in the Tower of London on a charge of high treason.

For this was, it seemed, the Fifth of November, the day on which the
Gunpowder Plot should have been carried out; and Elfrida it was, and not
Mr. Tresham, Lord Monteagle's cousin, who had given away the whole
business.

But how had Elfrida known? Could it be that she had dreams like his, and
in those dreams visited later times when all this was matter of history?
Dickie's brain felt fat--swollen--as though it would burst, and he was
glad to go to bed--even in that cupboardy place with the panels. But he
begged the nurse to leave the panel open.

And when he woke next day it was all true. His aunt and uncle and his
two cousins were in the Tower and gloom hung over Arden House in Soho
like a black thunde