hen window. He watched her cunningly.

As soon as he saw her busy with the clothes-pegs, Master 'Biades
crept to a small iron door in the wall, a foot or two from the range,
and stealthily lifted the latch. The door opened on a deep,
old-fashioned oven, disused since the day when the late Mrs Bunney
(misguided woman) had blocked up her open hearth with a fire-new
apparatus.

The child peered ("peeked" as they say in Polpier) into the long
narrow chamber, so awesomely dark at its far end, and snatched a
fearful joy. In that cavity lay the treasure. Gold--untold gold!

He thrust his head into the aperture, and gloated. But it was so
deep that even when his eyes became used to the darkness he could see
nothing of the hoard. He wanted to gloat more.

Tingling premonitions ran down his small spine; thrills that,
reaching the region of the lower vertebrae, developed an almost
painful activity. . . . None the less, 'Biades could never tell just
how or at what moment his shoulders, hips, legs, found themselves
inside the oven; but in they successively went, and he was crawling
forward into the pitch-gloom on hands and knees, regretting
desperately (and too late) that he had forgotten to sneak a box of
matches, when afar behind him he heard a sound that raised every hair
on the nape of his young neck--the lifting of the back-door latch and
the letting-in of voices.

"You never _did!_" said the voice of 'Bert.

"Leave me to tell her," said the voice of 'Beida. "The way you're
goin', she'll have the palpitations afore you begin. . . . Mother,
dear--if you'll but take a seat. Is't for the tenth or the twelfth
time we'm tellin' 'ee that father's neither killed nor wounded?"

"Then what is it, on earth?" demanded the voice of Mrs Penhaligon.
"An' why should Mr Nanjivell be followin' you, of all people?
An' where's my blessed latest, that has been a handful ever since you
two left me, well knowin' the straits I'm put to?"

"If I'm introodin', ma'am--" said the voice of Nicky-Nan.

"Oh, no . . . not at all, Mr Nanjivell!--so long as you realise how
I'm situated. . . . An' whoever left that oven door open, I'll swear
I didn't."

'Beida stepped swiftly to the oven, swung the door wide enough to
allow a moment's glance within, and shut with a merciless clang.

She lifted her voice. "Mebbe," she announced, "'twas I that left it
on the hasp before runnin' out. I was thinkin' what a nice oven
'twas, an' how much bette