still pasture. _Kitty Shorthorn_ threw up her head and trotted away.

'I beg your pardon,' Philadelphia said; 'but it makes me furious. Don't
you hate those ridiculous old quizzes with their feathers and fronts,
who come to dinner and call you "child" in your own chair at your own
table?'

'I don't always come to dinner,' said Una, 'but I hate being called
"child." Please tell me about store-rooms and giving out things.'

'Ah, it's a great responsibility--particularly with that old cat Amoore
looking at the lists over your shoulder. And such a shocking thing
happened last summer! Poor crazy Cissie, my Nurse that I was telling you
of, she took three solid silver tablespoons.'

'Took! But isn't that stealing?' Una cried.

'Hsh!' said Philadelphia, looking round at Puck. 'All I say is she took
them without my leave. I made it right afterwards. So, as Dad says--and
he's a magistrate--it wasn't a legal offence; it was only compounding a
felony.'

'It sounds awful,' said Una.

'It was. My dear, I was furious! I had had the keys for ten months, and
I'd never lost anything before. I said nothing at first, because a big
house offers so many chances of things being mislaid, and coming to hand
later. "Fetching up in the lee-scuppers," my Uncle calls it. But next
week I spoke to old Cissie about it when she was doing my hair at night,
and she said I wasn't to worry my heart for trifles!'

'Isn't it like 'em?' Una burst out. 'They see you're worried over
something that really matters, and they say, "Don't worry"; as if _that_
did any good!'

'I quite agree with you, my dear; quite agree with you! I told Ciss the
spoons were solid silver, and worth forty shillings, so if the thief
were found, he'd be tried for his life.'

'Hanged, do you mean?' Una said.

'They ought to be; but Dad says no jury will hang a man nowadays for a
forty-shilling theft. They transport 'em into penal servitude at the
uttermost ends of the earth beyond the seas, for the term of their
natural life. I told Cissie that, and I saw her tremble in my mirror.
Then she cried, and caught hold of my knees, and I couldn't for my life
understand what it was all about,--she cried so. _Can_ you guess, my
dear, what that poor crazy thing had done? It was midnight before I
pieced it together. She had given the spoons to Jerry Gamm, the
Witchmaster on the Green, so that he might put a charm on me! Me!'

'Put a charm on you? Why?'

'That's what _I_ asked; and