ted his
breakfast, so he dressed himself with all possible speed, even
forgetting to fasten his bootlaces properly. He was in such a hurry that
he dropped his collar-stud, and it was as he stooped to pick it up that
he remembered his dream. Do you know that was really the first time he
had thought of it. The dream--that indeed would be something to think
about.

Breakfast was the really important thing. He went down very hungry
indeed. 'I shall ask for my breakfast directly I get down,' he said. 'I
shall ask the first person I meet.' And he met no one.

There was no one on the stairs, or in the hall, or in the dining-room,
or in the drawing-room. The library and billiard-room were empty of
living people, and the door of the nursery was locked. So then Philip
made his way into the regions beyond the baize door, where the servants'
quarters were. And there was no one in the kitchen, or in the servants'
hall, or in the butler's pantry, or in the scullery, or the washhouse,
or the larder. In all that big house, and it was much bigger than it
looked from the front because of the long wings that ran out on each
side of its back--in all that big house there was no one but Philip. He
felt certain of this before he ran upstairs and looked in all the
bedrooms and in the little picture gallery and the music-room, and then
in the servants' bedrooms and the very attics. There were interesting
things in those attics, but Philip only remembered that afterwards. Now
he tore down the stairs three at a time. All the room doors were open as
he had left them, and somehow those open doors frightened him more than
anything else. He ran along the corridors, down more stairs, past more
open doors and out through the back kitchen, along the moss-grown walk
by the brick wall and so round by the three yew trees and the mounting
block to the stable-yard. And there was no one there. Neither coachman
nor groom nor stable-boys. And there was no one in the stables, or the
coach-house, or the harness-room, or the loft.

Philip felt that he could not go back into the house. Something terrible
must have happened. Was it possible that any one could want the Grange
servants enough to kidnap them? Philip thought of the nurse and felt
that, at least as far as she was concerned, it was _not_ possible. Or
perhaps it was magic! A sort of Sleeping-Beauty happening! Only every
one had vanished instead of just being put to sleep for a hundred years.

He was al