the worst. _The Baby did not know them!_

[Illustration: The baby did not know them!]

They looked at each other in despair, and it was terrible to each, in
this dire emergency, to meet only the beautiful eyes of perfect
strangers, instead of the merry, friendly, commonplace, twinkling, jolly
little eyes of its own brothers and sisters.

"This is most truly awful," said Cyril when he had tried to lift up the
Lamb, and the Lamb had scratched like a cat and bellowed like a bull!
"We've got to _make friends_ with him! I can't carry him home screaming
like that. Fancy having to make friends with our own baby!--it's too
silly."

That, however, was exactly what they had to do. It took over an hour,
and the task was not rendered any easier by the fact that the Lamb was
by this time as hungry as a lion and as thirsty as a desert.

At last he consented to allow these strangers to carry him home by
turns, but as he refused to hold on to such new acquaintances he was a
dead weight, and most exhausting.

"Thank goodness, we're home!" said Jane, staggering through the iron
gate to where Martha, the nursemaid, stood at the front door shading her
eyes with her hand and looking out anxiously. "Here! Do take Baby!"

Martha snatched the Baby from her arms.

"Thanks be, _he's_ safe back," she said. "Where are the others, and
whoever to goodness gracious are all of you?"

"We're _us_, of course," said Robert.

"And who's Us, when you're at home?" asked Martha scornfully.

"I tell you it's _us_, only we're beautiful as the day," said Cyril.
"I'm Cyril, and these are the others, and we're jolly hungry. Let us in,
and don't be a silly idiot."

Martha merely dratted Cyril's impudence and tried to shut the door in
his face.

"I know we _look_ different, but I'm Anthea, and we're so tired, and
it's long past dinner-time."

"Then go home to your dinners, whoever you are; and if our children put
you up to this play-acting you can tell them from me they'll catch it,
so they know what to expect!" With that she did bang the door. Cyril
rang the bell violently. No answer. Presently cook put her head out of a
bedroom window and said--

"If you don't take yourselves off, and that precious sharp, I'll go and
fetch the police." And she slammed down the window.

"It's no good," said Anthea. "Oh, do, do come away before we get sent to
prison!"

The boys said it was nonsense, and the law of England couldn't put you
in prison for just b