stand up. But his limbs were too stiff.
Edred rubbed his legs, while Dickie stretched his fingers to get the
pins and needles out of his arms.

Edred had stuck the candle in the sand. It made a ring of light round
them. That was why they did not see a dark figure that came quietly
creeping across the sand towards them. It was quite close to them before
Edred looked up.

[Illustration: "'ELFRIDA!' SAID BOTH BOYS AT ONCE"

_Page_ 272]

"Oh!" he gasped, and Dickie, looking up, whispered, "It's all up--_run_.
Never mind me. I shall get away all right."

"No," said Edred, and then with a joyous leap of the heart perceived
that the dark figure was Elfrida in her father's ulster.

("I hadn't time to put on my stockings," she explained later. "You'd
have known me a mile off by my white legs if I hadn't covered them up
with this.")

"Elfrida!" said both boys at once.

"Well, you didn't think I was going to be out of it," she said. "I've
been behind you all the way, Edred. Don't tell me anything. I won't ask
any questions, only come along out of it. Lean on me."

They got him up to the passage, one on each side, and by that time
Dickie could use his legs and his crutch. They got home and roused Lord
Arden, and told him Dickie was found and all about it, and he roused the
house, and he and Beale and half-a-dozen men from the village went up to
the cave and found that wicked man and woman in a stupid sleep, and tied
their hands and marched them to the town and to the police-station.

When the man was searched the letter was found on him which the man--it
was that redheaded man you have heard of--had taken from Talbot
Court.

"I wish you joy of your good fortune, my boy," said Lord Arden when he
had read the letter. "Of course we must look into things, but I feel no
doubt at all that you _are_ Lord Arden!"

"I don't want to be," said Dickie, and that was true. Yet at the same
time he did want to be. The thought of being Richard, Lord Arden, he who
had been just little lame Dickie of Deptford, of owning this glorious
castle, of being the master of an old name and an old place, this
thought sang in his heart a very beautiful tune. Yet what he said was
true. There is so often room in our hearts for two tunes at a time. "I
don't want to be. You ought to be, sir. You've been so kind to me," he
said.

"My dear boy," said the father of Edred and Elfrida, "I did very well
without the title and the castle, and if they're yo