By this time the ten eyes had got used to the light of the candles, and no one could help seeing that Anthea spoke the truth.
‘It seems an odd place to do good and kind acts in, though,’ said Jane. ‘There’s no one to do them to.’
‘Don’t you be too sure,’ said Cyril; ‘just round the next turning we might find a prisoner who has languished here for years and years, and we could take him out on our carpet and restore him to his sorrowing friends.’
‘Of course we could,’ said Robert, standing up and holding the candle above his head to see further off; ‘or we might find the bones of a poor prisoner and take them to his friends to be buried properly—that’s always a kind action in books, though I never could see what bones matter.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Jane.
‘I know exactly where we shall find the bones, too,’ Robert went on. ‘You see that dark arch just along the passage? Well, just inside there—’
‘If you don’t stop going on like that,’ said Jane, firmly, ‘I shall scream, and then I’ll faint—so now then!’
‘And I will, too,’ said Anthea.
Robert was not pleased at being checked in his flight of fancy.
‘You girls will never be great writers,’ he said bitterly. ‘They just love to think of things in dungeons, and chains, and knobbly bare human bones, and—’