‘Aunt Grace won’t have anything to do with him,’ said Emmeline, rather defiantly. ‘It’s we who are adopting him, not her. Nobody else will know anything about him, not even Mary. I’d like to tell her, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be safe. She might think it her duty to tell Aunt Grace—one never quite knows with grown-up people, even the nicest of them.’
‘But how are you going to manage about his food and the nice house to live in, if nobody’s to know about him?’ was Kitty’s very natural question.
‘He’ll live in the Feudal Castle, and we’ll buy his food with the money in my extra money-box,’ said Emmeline. ‘It’ll be quite all right to use it in that way, for it was for poor little children such as Diamond Jubilee that we collected it.’
For about five seconds the twins gazed at her open-mouthed. Such a scheme was beyond their most brilliant imaginings. Then Micky startled the passers-by with a wild war-whoop, and Kitty gasped: ‘How perfectly bea-u-tiful! Why, it’ll be just like the Young Pretender—taking him food, I mean, and keeping his hiding-place secret from everybody.’
‘We’ll have to bind ourselves by a solemn oath of secrecy,’ cried Micky. ‘Here goes—if I let out about Diamond Jubilee, may I and my descendants——’
‘Micky, you know Aunt Grace said we weren’t to say that,’ said Kitty, in a voice of distress.
‘No, Micky; it’s not nice,’ said Emmeline.
‘I was only going to say, “May we lose our shirt-studs even to the hundredth generation!” said Micky, calmly. ‘Aunt Grace invented that herself, so there!’