"Well, then!" exclaimed Henry, proud of his superior knowledge, "I advise you all to take care of yourselves, or you will lose your senses."
"Why should we do that?" said Julia. "Is the conjurer going to steal them? I shall congratulate him on the treasure he will get from some of us at least;" and she looked round to see if Miss Cunningham were near; but she had not yet made her appearance, and Julia's satire was lost.
"I really am afraid for the little ones," continued Henry. "Conjurers do such wonderful things, and they generally dress themselves up in an outlandish way; and the one I saw talked a sort of double Dutch, just to make us think that he came from Timbuctoo."
"If that be a qualification for a conjurer," said Julia, "we had better get poor Mr Cunningham to exhibit. I defy any one to know what part of the world he comes from."
"So he would make a capital conjurer," said Henry Dornford; "and he would not want a mask either; for he can twist his face into a hundred and twenty different shapes in a minute. Just look, I am sure I can do it exactly like him."
"Ah: but can you talk too?" said Julia: "it is nothing without the stammering and stuttering."
"But he does not stammer," observed Mary Warner. "Never mind," said Henry. "Listen—yet wait—I will go out of the room, and come in again in his blind way, with a glass to my eye, and then speak, and you shall tell me if you would have known us apart."
Julia laughed heartily at the idea, and Henry was just going when he was stopped by Amy.
"I wish," she said, timidly, "you would not do it, because"—— and here she paused.
"Because what?" asked Henry, in great astonishment.