red velvet and a
brigand's hat with a feather in it, just as if he was part of a circus.
I'm glad Mother doesn't dress me like that. The other day I met him
and he'd got a bow and arrow. She'd actually sent him into the street
with a bow and arrow. I said 'Hullo, Robin Hood,' not meaning
anything, and he began to cry; it was awkward, and I'm sure he feels
it. Father said that the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children
ought to interfere, but I think that was perhaps only one of Father's
jokes."

"I think," suggested Mother, who had caught audible fragments of this
conversation, "I think you children had better run away now and play."

The morning appeared to go quite quickly up to the cutlets and the
pancake stage.

The late afternoon shadows threw their creeping patterns over both
lawns, and still there was no sign whatever of their eccentric friend
Lal.

Tea-time came and passed, and then the shadows grew deeper, first blue,
then violet, then black, the trees and shrubs could scarcely be
distinguished at all; and, as ill luck would have it, there was no moon.

At length the time arrived when the family not unreasonably suggested
that the blinds of the house should be pulled down. Here was a
dilemma. How was it possible to warn the household of the
Pleasant-Faced Lion's approach if the blinds were pulled down? When
Ridgwell found, in spite of much lingering, that the last crumb of cake
had been consumed, to say nothing of the last currant which he had made
last quite a long time, and that the third summons to go to bed must
have some sort of notice taken of it, he resigned himself to the
inevitable, and with a hopeless look at Christine, prepared to talk to
Father.

Father was reading quite quietly, and apparently deeply engrossed in a
book, and somehow that didn't help matters.

"Please, Father, would you mind very much if the hall door and the back
door were both left wide open all night?"

Father considered this somewhat odd request for a space, then inquired
with a stray gleam of amusement in his eyes, "Do you consider the house
stuffy? Or have you suddenly adopted one of the Futurist ideas
concerning Health?"

"No, it isn't that, but Chris and I expect somebody; no, I mean
_something_, and we should be so disappointed if it, no, I mean _he_
didn't come."

"Rather a late visitor," said Father, "and rather an inconsiderate one
if this quite Eastern welcome of him includes us all catching