at's
fashionable now, and we don't care about taking it."

"I believe they think we've stolen it," said Anthea, rejoining the
others in the street; "if we had gloves they wouldn't think we were so
dishonest. It's my hands being so dirty fills their minds with doubts."

So they chose a humble shop, and the girls bought cotton gloves, the
kind at a shilling, but when they offered a guinea the woman looked at
it through her spectacles and said she had no change; so the gloves had
to be paid for out of Cyril's money with which he meant to buy rabbits
and so had the green imitation crocodile-skin purse at nine-pence which
had been bought at the same time. They tried several more shops, the
kinds where you buy toys and perfume and silk handkerchiefs and books,
and fancy boxes of stationery, and photographs of objects of interest in
the vicinity. But nobody cared to change a guinea that day in Rochester,
and as they went from shop to shop they got dirtier and dirtier, and
their hair got more and more untidy, and Jane slipped and fell down on a
part of the road where a water cart had just gone by. Also they got very
hungry, but they found no one would give them anything to eat for their
guineas.

After trying two baker shops in vain, they became so hungry, perhaps
from the smell of the cake in the shops, as Cyril suggested, that they
formed a plan of campaign in whispers and carried it out in desperation.
They marched into a third baker shop,--Beale was his name,--and before
the people behind the counter could interfere each child had seized
three new penny buns, clapped the three together between its dirty
hands, and taken a big bite out of the triple sandwich. Then they stood
at bay, with the twelve buns in their hands and their mouths very full
indeed. The shocked baker's man bounded round the corner.

"Here," said Cyril, speaking as distinctly as he could, and holding out
the guinea he got ready before entering the shops, "pay yourself out of
that."

Mr. Beale snatched the coin, bit it, and put it in his pocket.

[Illustration: Mr. Beale snatched the coin, bit it, and put it in his
pocket]

"Off you go," he said, brief and stern like the man in the song.

"But the change?" said Anthea, who had a saving mind.

"Change!" said the man, "I'll change you! Hout you goes; and you may
think yourselves lucky I don't send for the police to find out where you
got it!"

In the Gardens of the Castle the millionaires finished