y to be the first to mention it,
and no doubt the aunt has her own reasons for not broaching the subject.

But of course they both know that they have been there together, and it
is easy to get on with people when you and they alike belong to the
_Peoplewhounderstand_.

* * * * *

If you look in the A.B.C. that your people have you will not find
'_Whereyouwantogoto._' It is only in the red velvet bound copy that
Amabel found in her aunt's best bedroom.

XI

KENNETH AND THE CARP

Kenneth's cousins had often stayed with him, but he had never till now
stayed with them. And you know how different everything is when you are
in your own house. You are certain exactly what games the grown-ups
dislike and what games they will not notice; also what sort of mischief
is looked over and what sort is not. And, being accustomed to your own
sort of grown-ups, you can always be pretty sure when you are likely to
catch it. Whereas strange houses are, in this matter of catching it,
full of the most unpleasing surprises.

You know all this. But Kenneth did not. And still less did he know what
were the sort of things which, in his cousins' house, led to
disapproval, punishment, scoldings; in short, to catching it. So that
that business of cousin Ethel's jewel-case, which is where this story
ought to begin, was really not Kenneth's fault at all. Though for a
time.... But I am getting on too fast.

Kenneth's cousins were four,--Conrad, Alison, George, and Ethel. The
three first were natural sort of cousins somewhere near his own age, but
Ethel was hardly like a cousin at all, more like an aunt. Because she
was grown-up. She wore long dresses and all her hair on the top of her
head, a mass of combs and hairpins; in fact she had just had her
twenty-first birthday with iced cakes and a party and lots of presents,
most of them jewelry. And that brings me again to that affair of the
jewel-case, or would bring me if I were not determined to tell things in
their proper order, which is the first duty of a story-teller.

Kenneth's home was in Kent, a wooden house among cherry orchards, and
the nearest river five miles away. That was why he looked forward in
such a very extra and excited way to his visit to his cousins. Their
house was very old, red brick with ivy all over it. It had a secret
staircase, only the secret was not kept any longer, and the housemaids
carried pails and brooms up and down the