nd then suppose you're wrong? Suppose Uncle Masterman's alive and
kicking?'

'Well, even then,' responded the plotter, 'we are no worse off than we
were before; in fact, we're better. Uncle Masterman must die some day;
as long as Uncle Joseph was alive, he might have died any day; but we're
out of all that trouble now: there's no sort of limit to the game that I
propose--it can be kept up till Kingdom Come.'

'If I could only see how you meant to set about it' sighed John. 'But
you know, Morris, you always were such a bungler.'

'I'd like to know what I ever bungled,' cried Morris; 'I have the best
collection of signet rings in London.'

'Well, you know, there's the leather business,' suggested the other.
'That's considered rather a hash.'

It was a mark of singular self-control in Morris that he suffered this
to pass unchallenged, and even unresented.

'About the business in hand,' said he, 'once we can get him up to
Bloomsbury, there's no sort of trouble. We bury him in the cellar, which
seems made for it; and then all I have to do is to start out and find a
venal doctor.'

'Why can't we leave him where he is?' asked John.

'Because we know nothing about the country,' retorted Morris. 'This wood
may be a regular lovers' walk. Turn your mind to the real difficulty.
How are we to get him up to Bloomsbury?'

Various schemes were mooted and rejected. The railway station at
Browndean was, of course, out of the question, for it would now be a
centre of curiosity and gossip, and (of all things) they would be
least able to dispatch a dead body without remark. John feebly proposed
getting an ale-cask and sending it as beer, but the objections to this
course were so overwhelming that Morris scorned to answer. The purchase
of a packing-case seemed equally hopeless, for why should two gentlemen
without baggage of any kind require a packing-case? They would be more
likely to require clean linen.

'We are working on wrong lines,' cried Morris at last. 'The thing must
be gone about more carefully. Suppose now,' he added excitedly, speaking
by fits and starts, as if he were thinking aloud, 'suppose we rent
a cottage by the month. A householder can buy a packing-case without
remark. Then suppose we clear the people out today, get the packing-case
tonight, and tomorrow I hire a carriage or a cart that we could
drive ourselves--and take the box, or whatever we get, to Ringwood or
Lyndhurst or somewhere; we could label it "sp