had found his skeleton.

"Any row with any of you?" Father asked. But there hadn't been any.

"Was he worried about anything? Done anything wrong, and afraid to own
up?"

We turned cold, for we knew what he meant. That parcel was so horribly
like the lady's hat and gloves that she takes off on the seashore and
leaves with a letter saying it has come to this.

"_No_, _no_, NO, NO!" we all said. "He was perfectly jolly all the
morning."

Then suddenly Dicky leaned on the table and one of H.O.'s boots toppled
over, and there was something white inside. It was a letter. H.O. must
have written it before we left home. It said--

"DEAR FATHER AND EVERY ONE,--I am going to be a
Clown. When I am rich and reveared I will come
back rolling.

"Your affectionate son,
"HORACE OCTAVIUS BASTABLE."

"Rolling?" Father said.

"He means rolling in money," Alice said. Oswald noticed that every one
round the table where H.O.'s boots were dignifiedly respected as they
lay, was a horrid pale colour, like when the salt is thrown into
snapdragons.

"Oh dear!" Dora cried, "that was it. He asked me to make him a clown's
dress and keep it deeply secret. He said he wanted to surprise Aunt
Margaret and Albert's uncle. And I didn't think it was wrong," said
Dora, screwing up her face; she then added, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh, oh!"
and with these concluding remarks she began to howl.

Father thumped her on the back in an absent yet kind way.

"But where's he gone?" he said, not to any one in particular. "I saw the
butcher; he said H.O. asked him to take a parcel home and went back
round the Cedars."

Here Dicky coughed and said--

"I didn't think he meant anything, but the day after Noel was talking
about singing ballads in Rome, and getting poet's lyres given him, H.O.
did say if Noel had been really keen on the Roman lyres and things he
could easily have been a stowaway, and gone unknown."

"A stowaway!" said my Father, sitting down suddenly and hard.

"In Aunt Margaret's big dress basket--the one she let him hide in when
we had hide-and-seek there. He talked a lot about it after Noel had said
that about the lyres--and the Italians being so poetical, you know. You
remember that day we had toffee."

My Father is prompt and decisive in action, so is his eldest son.

"I'm off to the Cedars," he said.

"Do let me come, Father," said the decis