hen. I'll tell them there are
dangerous characters about--that's true enough. Now remember, I trust
you both. But I don't think they'll try it till after dark, so you're
quite safe. Good-bye, darlings."

And she locked her bedroom door and went off with the key in her pocket.

The children could not help admiring the dashing and decided way in
which she had acted. They thought how useful she would have been in
organising escape from some of the tight places in which they had found
themselves of late in consequence of their ill-timed wishes.

"She's a born general," said Cyril,--"but _I_ don't know what's going to
happen to us. Even if the girls were to hunt for that old Sammyadd and
find it, and get it to take the jewels away again, mother would only
think we hadn't looked out properly and let the burglars sneak in and
get them--or else the police will think _we've_ got them--or else that
she's been fooling them. Oh, it's a pretty decent average ghastly mess
this time, and no mistake!"

He savagely made a paper boat and began to float it in the bath, as he
had been told to do.

Robert went into the garden and sat down on the worn yellow grass, with
his miserable head between his helpless hands.

Anthea and Jane whispered together in the passage downstairs, where the
cocoanut matting was--with the hole in it that you always caught your
foot in if you were not careful. Martha's voice could be heard in the
kitchen,--grumbling loud and long.

"It's simply quite too dreadfully awful," said Anthea. "How do you know
all the diamonds are there, too? If they aren't, the police will think
mother and father have got them, and that they've only given up some of
them for a kind of desperate blind. And they'll be put in prison, and we
shall be branded outcasts, the children of felons. And it won't be at
all nice for father and mother either," she added, by a candid
after-thought.

"But what can we _do_?" asked Jane.

"Nothing--at least we might look for the Psammead again. It's a very,
_very_ hot day. He may have come out to warm that whisker of his."

"He won't give us any more beastly wishes to-day," said Jane flatly. "He
gets crosser and crosser every time we see him. I believe he hates
having to give wishes."

Anthea had been shaking her head gloomily--now she stopped shaking it so
suddenly that it really looked as though she were pricking up her ears.

"What is it?" asked Jane. "Oh, have you thought of something?"