was. What d'you say to stopping along of me a bit, my
boy? There's room in the cottage for all five of us. My son James here
tells me you've been's good as a son to him."

"I'd love it," said Dickie. So that was settled. There were two bedrooms
for Beale and his father, and Dickie slept in a narrow, whitewashed slip
of a room that had once been a larder. The brown spaniel and True slept
on the rag hearth-rug in the kitchen. And everything was as cozy as cozy
could be.

"We can send for any of the dawgs any minute if we feel we can't stick
it without 'em," said Beale, smoking his pipe in the front garden.

"You mean to stay a long time, then," said Dickie.

"I dunno. You see, I was born and bred 'ere. The air tastes good, don't
it? An' the water's good. Didn't you notice the tea tasted quite
different from what it does anywhere else? That's the soft water, that
is. An' the old chap.... Yes--and there's one or two other
things--yes--I reckon us'll stop on 'ere a bit."

And Dickie was very glad. For now he was near Arden Castle, and could
see it any time that he chose to walk a couple of hundred yards and
look down. And presently he would see Edred and Elfrida. Would they know
him? That was the question. Would they remember that he and they had
been cousins and friends when James the First was King?

CHAPTER IX

KIDNAPPED

AND now New Cross seemed to go backwards and very far away, its dirty
streets, its sordid shifts, its crowds of anxious, unhappy people, who
never had quite enough of anything, and Dickie's home was in a pleasant
cottage from whose windows you could see great green rolling downs, and
the smooth silver and blue of the sea, and from whose door you stepped,
not on to filthy pavements, but on to a neat brick path, leading between
beds glowing with flowers.

Also, he was near Arden, the goal of seven months' effort. Now he would
see Edred and Elfrida again, and help them to find the hidden treasure,
as he had once helped them to find their father.

This joyful thought put the crown on his happiness.

But he presently perceived that though he was so close to Arden Castle
he did not seem to be much nearer to the Arden children. It is not an
easy thing to walk into the courtyard of a ruined castle and ring the
bell of a strange house and ask for people whom you have only met in
dreams, or as good as dreams. And I don't know how Dickie would have
managed if Destiny had not kindly come to his