usual, and started our
desperate work of changing silver sequences into gold half-sovereigns,
with gold paint.

Noel was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying to
write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that
he could think about rhymes.

We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard
Noel say: 'Hist! Hide the plant!'

We didn't take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done
to play a game of misers, which was Alice's idea.

'Hist!' Noel said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: 'It's
a _real_ hist! I tell you there's someone on the stairs.'

And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of
mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with
the key labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.'

Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near
the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.

We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear
Oswald's heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that
it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days
of unexplained idleness. If we _did_ have to pay for finding the
Enchanceried House, this was when we paid.

There _were_ feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The
author distinctly heard the words 'replete with every modern
inconvenience,' and 'pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and
rail.'

And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had
got itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it.

We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us.

The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, and
stopped at the door.

'This is the nursery,' said a manly voice. 'Ah, locked! I quite
understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.'

Of course _we_ had the keys, and this was the moment that Noel chose for
dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the
mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is
something about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap--Virgil or
Lucretius--that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the
cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never
forget.

There was an awful silence--quite a long one.

Then another voice said:

'There's someone in there.'

'Look at that bench,' said