The curate looked slightly puzzled. The tale was well sustained, and certainly circumstantial. After all, the boy might really have seen something. How was the poor man to know—though the chaste and lofty diction might have supplied a hint—that the whole yarn was a free adaptation from the last Penny Dreadful lent us by the knife-and-boot boy?
‘Why did you not alarm the house?’ he asked.
‘Cos I was afraid,’ said Harold sweetly, ‘that p’raps they mightn’t believe me!’
‘But how did you get down here, you naughty little boy?’ put in Aunt Maria.
Harold was hard pressed—by his own flesh and blood, too!
At that moment Edward touched me on the shoulder and glided off through the laurels. When some ten yards away he gave a low whistle. I replied with another. The effect was magical. Aunt Maria started up with a shriek. Harold gave one startled glance around, and then fled like a hare, made straight for the back-door, burst in upon the servants at supper, and buried himself in the broad bosom of the cook, his special ally. The curate faced the laurels—hesitatingly. But Aunt Maria flung herself on him. ‘O Mr. Hodgitts!’ I heard her cry, ‘you are brave! for my sake do not be rash!’ He was not rash. When I peeped out a second later, the coast was entirely clear.
By this time there were sounds of a household timidly emerging; and Edward remarked to me that perhaps we had better be off. Retreat was an easy matter. A stunted laurel gave a leg-up on to the garden wall, which led in its turn to the roof of an out-house, up which, at a dubious angle, we could crawl to the window of the box-room. This overland route had been revealed to us one day by the domestic cat, when hard pressed in the course of an otter-hunt, in which the cat—somewhat unwillingly—was filling the title rôle; and it had proved distinctly useful on occasions like the present. We were snug in bed—minus some cuticle from knees and elbows—and Harold, sleepily chewing something sticky, had been carried up in the arms of the friendly cook, ere the clamour of the burglar-hunters had died away.
“THIS OVERLAND ROUTE HAD BEEN REVEALED TO
US ONE DAY BY THE DOMESTIC CAT, WHEN HARD
PRESSED IN THE COURSE OF AN OTTER-HUNT”