ald was so pleased to think that the
Wouldbegoods was unrecoverishly dead that he gave Denny and Noel, who
were sitting on the step below him, a good-humoured, playful, gentle,
loving, brotherly shove, and said, 'Get along down, it's tea-time!'

No reader who understands justice and the real rightness of things, and
who is to blame for what, will ever think it could have been Oswald's
fault that the two other boys got along down by rolling over and over
each other, and bursting the door at the bottom of the stairs open by
their revolving bodies. And I should like to know whose fault it was
that Mrs Pettigrew was just on the other side of that door at that very
minute? The door burst open, and the Impetuous bodies of Noel and Denny
rolled out of it into Mrs Pettigrew, and upset her and the tea-tray.
Both revolving boys were soaked with tea and milk, and there were one or
two cups and things smashed. Mrs Pettigrew was knocked over, but none of
her bones were broken. Noel and Denny were going to be sent to bed, but
Oswald said it was all his fault. He really did this to give the others
a chance of doing a refined golden deed by speaking the truth and saying
it was not his fault. But you cannot really count on anyone. They did
not say anything, but only rubbed the lumps on their late-revolving
heads. So it was bed for Oswald, and he felt the injustice hard.

But he sat up in bed and read The Last of the Mohicans, and then he
began to think. When Oswald really thinks he almost always thinks of
something. He thought of something now, and it was miles better than the
idea we had decided on in the secret staircase, of advertising in the
Kentish Mercury and saying if Albert's uncle's long-lost grandmother
would call at the Moat House she might hear of something much to her
advantage.

What Oswald thought of was that if we went to Hazelbridge and asked
Mr B. Munn, Grocer, that drove us home in the cart with the horse that
liked the wrong end of the whip best, he would know who the lady was
in the red hat and red wheels that paid him to drive us home that
Canterbury night. He must have been paid, of course, for even grocers
are not generous enough to drive perfect strangers, and five of
them too, about the country for nothing. Thus we may learn that even
unjustness and sending the wrong people to bed may bear useful fruit,
which ought to be a great comfort to everyone when they are unfairly
treated. Only it most likely won't be.