id, 'I must tell
you; I wish I'd told Albert's uncle. I'm a thief, and if I die to-night
I know where thieves go to.' So Oswald saw it was no good and he sat
up in bed and said--'Go ahead.' So Alice stood shivering and said--'I
hadn't enough money for the telegram, so I took the bad sixpence out of
the exchequer. And I paid for it with that and the fivepence I had. And
I wouldn't tell you, because if you'd stopped me doing it I couldn't
have borne it; and if you'd helped me you'd have been a thief too. Oh,
what shall I do?'

Oswald thought a minute, and then he said--

'You'd better have told me. But I think it will be all right if we pay
it back. Go to bed. Cross with you? No, stupid! Only another time you'd
better not keep secrets.'

So she kissed Oswald, and he let her, and she went back to bed.

The next day Albert's uncle took Noel away, before Oswald had time to
persuade Alice that we ought to tell him about the sixpence. Alice was
very unhappy, but not so much as in the night: you can be very miserable
in the night if you have done anything wrong and you happen to be awake.
I know this for a fact.

None of us had any money except Eliza, and she wouldn't give us any
unless we said what for; and of course we could not do that because of
the honour of the family. And Oswald was anxious to get the sixpence to
give to the telegraph people because he feared that the badness of that
sixpence might have been found out, and that the police might come for
Alice at any moment. I don't think I ever had such an unhappy day. Of
course we could have written to Albert's uncle, but it would have taken
a long time, and every moment of delay added to Alice's danger. We
thought and thought, but we couldn't think of any way to get that
sixpence. It seems a small sum, but you see Alice's liberty depended
on it. It was quite late in the afternoon when I met Mrs Leslie on the
Parade. She had a brown fur coat and a lot of yellow flowers in her
hands. She stopped to speak to me, and asked me how the Poet was. I told
her he had a cold, and I wondered whether she would lend me sixpence if
I asked her, but I could not make up my mind how to begin to say it. It
is a hard thing to say--much harder than you would think. She talked to
me for a bit, and then she suddenly got into a cab, and said--

'I'd no idea it was so late,' and told the man where to go. And just as
she started she shoved the yellow flowers through the window and said,