what her sensitive
brother's delicate feelings had already got hold of. 'We have done it
this time, haven't we?'

'Since you ask me thus pointedly,' answered Albert's uncle at last, 'I
cannot but confess that I think you have indeed done it. Those pots on
the top of the library cupboard ARE Roman pottery. The amphorae
which you hid in the mound are probably--I can't say for certain,
mind--priceless. They are the property of the owner of this house. You
have taken them out and buried them. The President of the Maidstone
Antiquarian Society has taken them away in his bag. Now what are you
going to do?'

Alice and I did not know what to say, or where to look. The others added
to our pained position by some ungenerous murmurs about our not being so
jolly clever as we thought ourselves.

There was a very far from pleasing silence. Then Oswald got up. He
said--

'Alice, come here a sec; I want to speak to you.'

As Albert's uncle had offered no advice, Oswald disdained to ask him for
any.

Alice got up too, and she and Oswald went into the garden, and sat down
on the bench under the quince tree, and wished they had never tried to
have a private lark of their very own with the Antiquities--'A Private
Sale', Albert's uncle called it afterwards. But regrets, as nearly
always happens, were vain. Something had to be done.

But what?

Oswald and Alice sat in silent desperateness, and the voices of the
gay and careless others came to them from the lawn, where, heartless
in their youngness, they were playing tag. I don't know how they could.
Oswald would not like to play tag when his brother and sister were in a
hole, but Oswald is an exception to some boys.

But Dicky told me afterwards he thought it was only a joke of Albert's
uncle's.

The dusk grew dusker, till you could hardly tell the quinces from the
leaves, and Alice and Oswald still sat exhausted with hard thinking, but
they could not think of anything. And it grew so dark that the moonlight
began to show.

Then Alice jumped up--just as Oswald was opening his mouth to say
the same thing--and said, 'Of course--how silly! I know. Come on in,
Oswald.' And they went on in.

Oswald was still far too proud to consult anyone else. But he just asked
carelessly if Alice and he might go into Maidstone the next day to
buy some wire-netting for a rabbit-hutch, and to see after one or two
things.

Albert's uncle said certainly. And they went by train with the bailiff