others were doing
without their knowing he cared. So he went into the linen-room and
looked out of its window, and he saw they were playing Kings and
Queens--and Noel had the biggest paper crown and the longest stick
sceptre.

Oswald turned away without a word, for it really was sickening.

Then suddenly his weary eyes fell upon something they had not before
beheld. It was a square trap-door in the ceiling of the linen-room.

Oswald never hesitated. He crammed the cricket ball into his pocket and
climbed up the shelves and unbolted the trap-door, and shoved it up,
and pulled himself up through it. Though above all was dark and smelt
of spiders, Oswald fearlessly shut the trap-door down again before he
struck a match. He always carries matches. He is a boy fertile in every
subtle expedient. Then he saw he was in the wonderful, mysterious place
between the ceiling and the roof of the house. The roof is beams
and tiles. Slits of light show through the tiles here and there. The
ceiling, on its other and top side, is made of rough plaster and beams.
If you walk on the beams it is all right--if you walk on the plaster you
go through with your feet. Oswald found this out later, but some fine
instinct now taught the young explorer where he ought to tread and where
not. It was splendid. He was still very angry with the others and he was
glad he had found out a secret they jolly well didn't know.

He walked along a dark, narrow passage. Every now and then cross-beams
barred his way, and he had to creep under them. At last a small door
loomed before him with cracks of light under and over. He drew back the
rusty bolts and opened it. It opened straight on to the leads, a flat
place between two steep red roofs, with a parapet two feet high back and
front, so that no one could see you. It was a place no one could have
invented better than, if they had tried, for hiding in.

Oswald spent the whole afternoon there. He happened to have a volume of
Percy's Anecdotes in his pocket, the one about lawyers, as well as a
few apples. While he read he fingered the cricket ball, and presently it
rolled away, and he thought he would get it by-and-by.

When the tea-bell rang he forgot the ball and went hurriedly down, for
apples do not keep the inside from the pangs of hunger.

Noel met him on the landing, got red in the face, and said--

'It wasn't QUITE fair about the ball, because H. O. and I had eaten the
coconut. YOU can have it.'