to protect girls and take care of them--they
can jolly well take care of themselves really it seems to me--still,
this is what Albert's uncle calls one of the 'rules of the game', so we
are bound to defend them and fight for them to the death, if needful.
Denny knows a quotation which says--

'What dire offence from harmless causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trefoil things.'

He says this means that all great events come from three
things--threefold, like the clover or trefoil, and the causes are always
harmless. Trefoil is short for threefold.

There were certainly three things that led up to the adventure which is
now going to be told you. The first was our Indian uncle coming down to
the country to see us. The second was Denny's tooth. The third was only
our wanting to go hunting; but if you count it in it makes the thing
about the trefoil come right. And all these causes were harmless.

It is a flattering thing to say, and it was not Oswald who said it, but
Dora. She said she was certain our uncle missed us, and that he felt he
could no longer live without seeing his dear ones (that was us).

Anyway, he came down, without warning, which is one of the few bad
habits that excellent Indian man has, and this habit has ended in
unpleasantness more than once, as when we played jungles.

However, this time it was all right. He came on rather a dull kind of
day, when no one had thought of anything particularly amusing to do. So
that, as it happened to be dinner-time and we had just washed our hands
and faces, we were all spotlessly clean (com-pared with what we are
sometimes, I mean, of course).

We were just sitting down to dinner, and Albert's uncle was just
plunging the knife into the hot heart of the steak pudding, when there
was the rumble of wheels, and the station fly stopped at the garden
gate. And in the fly, sitting very upright, with his hands on his knees,
was our Indian relative so much beloved. He looked very smart, with a
rose in his buttonhole. How different from what he looked in other days
when he helped us to pretend that our currant pudding was a wild boar
we were killing with our forks. Yet, though tidier, his heart still beat
kind and true. You should not judge people harshly because their clothes
are tidy. He had dinner with us, and then we showed him round the place,
and told him everything we thought he would like to hear, and about the
Tower of Mystery, and he said--