thing dreadful on
their minds. It made Ambrose all the more anxious to have someone to
bear his secret with him, and he went softly up to David and said in a
low voice:

"I want to speak to you."

"All right!" said David rather unwillingly, for he wanted to hear more
about Nearminster and Kettles.

"Not here," whispered Ambrose. "Upstairs--in the museum. It's very
important."

David turned and looked at his brother. Ambrose's cheeks were scarlet,
his eyes had a scared expression, and his hair was sticking up in spikes
as if he had been running his hands through it.

At these certain signs of excitement David at once concluded that
something had happened. He hastily thrust away his last books, and the
two boys left the school-room.

"Is it a ghost?" he asked as they ran up the flight of stairs leading to
the museum.

"Much worse," returned Ambrose. "It's something real. It's awful."

The museum looked bare and cold, and rather dusty, as if it had been
neglected lately; its deal shelves with their large white labels and
wide empty spaces seemed to gape hungrily--a cheerless place altogether,
with nothing comfortable or encouraging about it.

The boys sat down facing each other on two boxes, and Ambrose at once
began his story. Alarming as the news was, he had a faint hope while he
was telling it that David might not think it so bad as he did. David
always took things calmly, and his matter-of-fact way of looking at them
was often a support to Ambrose, whose imagination made him full of
fears. So now when he had finished he looked wistfully at his brother
and said, in a tone full of awe:

"Should you think we really are _thieves_?"

David's blue eyes got very large and round, but before answering this
question he put another: "What can they do to thieves?"

"Put them in prison, and make them work hard for ever so long," replied
Ambrose. "They used to hang them," he added gloomily.

"I don't believe father would let them put us in prison," said David.

"He couldn't help it," said Ambrose. "Nobody's father can. Don't you
remember when Giles Brown stole a silver mug, his father walked ten
miles to ask them to let him off, and they wouldn't?"

"Well, but,"--said David, feeling that there was a difference between
the two cases--"he stole a thing out of a house, and we didn't; and his
father was a hedger and ditcher, and our father is vicar of Easney."

"That wouldn't matter," said Ambrose. "It