smashed."

"Rather!" said Tom. "I've the marks of the beastly thing now."

"What was it? Let me hear the story," said Raeburn, leaning back in his
chair with a look of amusement flickering about his rather stern face.

"Why, father, it was years ago; you were on your first tour in America,
I must have been about twelve, and Tom fourteen. We had only just
settled in here, you know; and one unlucky Saturday we were playing in
the garden at 'King of the Castle.'"

"What's that?" asked Raeburn.

"Why, Tom was king, and I was the Republican Army; and Tom was standing
on the top of the wall trying to push me down. He had to sing:

"'I'm the king of the castle! Get down, you dirty rascal!'

And somehow I don't know how it was instead of climbing up, I pushed him
backward by mistake, and he went down with an awful crash into the next
garden. We knew it was the garden belonging to No. 16 quite a large
one it is for the hospital hasn't any. And when at last I managed to
scramble on to the wall, there was Tom, head downward, with his feet
sticking up through the roof of a greenhouse, and the rest of him all
among the flower pots."

Raeburn laughed heartily.

"There was a brute of a cactus jammed against my face, too," said Tom.
"How I ever got out alive was a marvel!"

"Well, what happened?" asked Raeburn.

"Why, we went round to tell the No. 16 people. Tom waited outside,
because he was so frightfully cut about, and I went in and saw an old,
old man a sort of Methusaleh who would ask my name, and whether I had
anything to do with you."

"What did you say to him?"

"I can't remember except that I asked him to let us pay for the glass by
installments, and tried to assure him that secularists were not in the
habit of smashing other people's property. He was a very jolly old man,
and of course he wouldn't let us pay for the glass though he frightened
me dreadfully by muttering that he shouldn't wonder if the glass and the
honesty combined cost him a pretty penny."

"Did you ever see him again?"

"Not to speak to, but we always nodded to each other when we passed in
the square. I've not seen him for ages. I thought he must be dead."

"He is dead," said Raeburn; "and he has left you three hundred pounds,
and he has left me his furnished house, with the sole proviso that I
live in it."

"What a brick!" cried Tom and Erica, in a breath. "Now fancy, if we
hadn't played at 'King of the Castle' that day!"

"And