y wedding!" and began to go. And
when our waggonette came round we all began to get in. And suddenly
Father said--

"Where's H.O.?" And we looked round. He was in absence.

"Fetch him along sharp--some of you," Father said; "I don't want to keep
the horses standing here in the cold all day."

So Oswald and Dicky went to fetch him along. We thought he might have
wandered back to what was left of the lunch--for he is young and he does
not always know better. But he was not there, and Oswald did not even
take a crystallised fruit in passing. He might easily have done this,
and no one would have minded, so it would not have been wrong. But it
would have been ungentlemanly. Dicky did not either. H.O. was not there.

We went into the other rooms, even the one the old ladies were crying
in, but of course we begged their pardons. And at last into the kitchen,
where the servants were smart with white bows and just sitting down to
their dinner, and Dicky said--

"I say, cookie love, have you seen H.O.?"

"Don't come here with your imperence!" the cook said, but she was
pleased with Dicky's unmeaning compliment all the same.

"_I_ see him," said the housemaid. "He was colloguing with the butcher
in the yard a bit since. He'd got a brown-paper parcel. Perhaps he got a
lift home."

So we went and told Father, and about the white present in the parcel.

"I expect he was ashamed to give it after all," Oswald said, "so he
hooked off home with it."

And we got into the wagonette.

"It wasn't a present, though," Dora said; "it was a different kind of
surprise--but it really is a secret."

Our good Father did not command her to betray her young brother.

But when we got home H.O. wasn't there. Mrs. Pettigrew hadn't seen him,
and he was nowhere about. Father biked back to the Cedars to see if he'd
turned up. No. Then all the gentlemen turned out to look for him through
the length and breadth of the land.

"He's too old to be stolen by gipsies," Alice said.

"And too ugly," said Dicky.

"Oh _don't_!" said both the girls; "and now when he's lost, too!"

We had looked for a long time before Mrs. Pettigrew came in with a
parcel she said the butcher had left. It was not addressed, but we knew
it was H.O.'s, because of the label on the paper from the shop where
Father gets his shirts. Father opened it at once.

Inside the parcel we found H.O.'s boots and braces, his best hat and his
chest-protector. And Oswald felt as if we