"I say, cookie love, have you seen H.O.?"
"Don't come here with your imperence!" the cook said, but she was pleased with Dicky's unmeaning compliment all the same.
"I see him," said the housemaid. "He was colloguing with the butcher in the yard a bit since. He'd got a brown-paper parcel. Perhaps he got a lift home."
So we went and told Father, and about the white present in the parcel.
"I expect he was ashamed to give it after all," Oswald said, "so he hooked off home with it."
And we got into the wagonette.
"It wasn't a present, though," Dora said; "it was a different kind of surprise—but it really is a secret."
Our good Father did not command her to betray her young brother.
But when we got home H.O. wasn't there. Mrs. Pettigrew hadn't seen him, and he was nowhere about. Father biked back to the Cedars to see if he'd turned up. No. Then all the gentlemen turned out to look for him through the length and breadth of the land.
"He's too old to be stolen by gipsies," Alice said.