NEXT morning Vivian awoke to find Ronald standing on a chair peering through a crevice of the blind. The remembrance of yesterday’s disaster flashed into his mind, and he was wide awake at once.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ he asked querulously. ‘It’s gray-dark, so you can’t see anything.’

‘I can’t think what in the world is the matter,’ answered Ronald in an excited whisper. ‘I’ve been awake since five—I heard it strike on the hall clock; and I think every one else in the house has been awake too. They have been opening and shutting doors, and talking in the hall, and some one went right out of the house and down to the lodge. I think it must have been Uncle Walter, for I heard footsteps on the gravel, and it was his cough, and after a while he came back with some one, for I heard them talking. They came upstairs, for I heard Aunt Dora’s voice, and now they are outside again. Somehow, I fancy it is a policeman; I can just see the top of his helmet. He is walking up and down the gravel.’

A policeman! Vivian turned cold with terror. He had dreamt of discovery and punishment, but he had never dreamt of anything as bad as this. Surely Uncle Walter would never be so cruel as to send him to jail, even although he had broken two windows and taken a toy pistol.

But the pistol was stolen, and Uncle Walter could be very strict. The thought made him desperate, and he sat up in silence, and began to grope about for his clothes. If he could only dress quickly, he thought, before it grew quite light, he might slip unnoticed down the back stairs and run away. Where he could run to could be settled later. Vague ideas of getting to the docks crossed his mind; he knew that there were docks somewhere in London, and if he once reached them he might get on board one of the boats as cabin-boy or something, and sail to America or Australia. At present his one mad wish was to escape from the policeman and from the discovery which was sure to come—nay, which had come already.

‘There are two of them,’ whispered Ronald excitedly, ‘and they seem to be looking for something among the bushes. I do wonder what has happened. Now they have gone round to the garden, and there is Uncle Walter standing on the doorstep talking to a gentleman in ordinary clothes. I can see him, for the gas in the hall is lit.’

Receiving no answer, he turned round, wondering if his brother had gone to sleep again.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ he asked in astonishment, for it was just light enough for him to see his brother sitting on the edge of the bed drawing on his stockings.

‘I’m going to get up,’ said Vivian slowly, ‘to see what’s the matter.’

His voice sounded harsh and broken, partly through terror, partly from his cold, which was decidedly worse.

‘You’re going to do nothing of the sort,’ said Ronald. ‘Aunt Dora said last night that you were to stay in bed to breakfast, if your cold was not quite better, and you are croaking like a raven. Look out, I’m coming back to bed, or I’ll catch cold too; I have stood here until I feel like a block of ice.’ With a flying leap he was back among the blankets. ‘Isn’t it lovely to come back to bed on a cold morning?’ he said, laughing. ‘I can understand what Dorothy meant when she said to mother that “the comfiest bit of bed is when one has to get up;”’ and then he rolled over, and settled himself for a nap before Anne came to pull up the blinds and bring in the hot water.

Poor Vivian had been obliged to lie down again too, but all his chances of sleep had been banished effectually; and as he lay, with wide-open eyes, watching the light in the room grow clearer and clearer, and listening to the unusual sounds which were still going on outside the room, he wondered what would have happened and where he would be by the time the darkness came again. Seven o’clock struck on the cuckoo clock in the hall, and a quarter past, and then the half-hour, and at last Anne came in without knocking, and pulled up the blinds, but she had on an old dirty apron, and no cap, and was so unlike her usual trim self that Ronald could not help asking, ‘Is there anything wrong, Anne? We have been hearing such a lot of talking all morning. Every one seemed to be up long before it was daylight.’

‘There’s plenty wrong, Master Ronald,’ was Anne’s somewhat grim answer. ‘The house has been broken into, and every morsel of silver taken, not to mention the master’s watch and a lot of the mistress’s jewellery. How the scoundrels have done it dear only knows, for they must have been in nearly every room in the house, and they have forced open the very safe itself, which stands in the master’s dressing-room. ’Tis a wonder we were not all murdered in our beds, for they seem to have been carrying firearms. And as if all that wasn’t enough, here is little Miss Isobel taken ill, and Doctor Robson shaking his head over her quite serious-like. So get up as quiet as you can, like good boys, and give no more trouble to any one than you can help.’

The boys needed no second bidding to get up. The news which Anne had brought was too exciting for them to linger a moment longer in bed. Vivian’s cold and his aunt’s injunction about it were alike forgotten, and indeed, as the little boy hurried into his clothes, he began to feel much better, for a weight of anxiety was lifted from his mind. Always quick to note the probable consequences of things, he saw at once that this unexpected development would divert suspicion from himself, even when the broken windows in the summer-house were discovered. Who was to know that the damage had not been done by the burglars for some reason of their own? The police were much more likely to suspect them than some one who was living in the house.

When the boys arrived downstairs, after a somewhat hasty toilet, they found everything in a state of dire confusion. Breakfast was laid in the servants’ hall, but no one seemed to have time to attend to it.

Little Claude, with a tearful, scared face, was standing holding Mary’s hand at the foot of the stairs, silently watching two policemen who were down on their knees on the parquetry floor, carefully examining some marks which had been made on the polished surface. It was plain that some one had walked across it with heavy boots on. In the opposite corner stood Mr Osbourne, his face stern and grave; and Anne, who had now got into a clean cap and apron, and was giving a concise account of how she had locked up the house on the previous evening to a tall man in a plain blue uniform, evidently a police inspector, who was taking down her story in a note-book. Aunt Dora was nowhere to be seen. The dining-room door was open, and they could see how the drawers in the sideboard and plate-cupboard had been forced, and their contents rifled, and most of them carried away.

Vivian would have gone into the room, but Mary pulled him back.

‘No one has to go in there, Master Vivian,’ she whispered; ‘it has to be left as it is until some very clever man, a detective from Scotland Yard, comes. They have telegraphed for him, and they expect him every minute. Till he comes, none of us has to go out or even up to our bedrooms.’

Mary spoke with a sort of gasp, and her rosy face was whiter than usual. She was an honest country girl, brought up in a quiet Suffolk village, and this was her first experience of service in London; and although her conscience was quite clear, and she could prove where she had been, and what she had done every minute of yesterday afternoon, she dreaded the interview, which she knew must come, with the detective, ‘who,’ Anne had informed her, ‘would begin by suspecting them all, and looking in all their boxes before he made up his mind that it had been none of them who had done it.’

Yesterday had been her Sunday out, so she felt that she would have even more questions to answer than the rest of her fellow-servants, and she kept saying over and over again to herself that she could tell him quite easily where she had been. She had gone to church in the morning, and then she had spent the rest of the day with a cousin who lived at Cricklewood, and her cousin’s husband, a respectable joiner, had seen her home at nine o’clock.

Presently Ralph came running in, looking flushed and important. He had been downstairs early, and had just been out for a tour of inspection on his own account.

‘I say, father,’ he cried, ‘do you know what I have discovered? The fellows have smashed two of the summer-house windows. The glass is lying all over the path.’

In his haste he had forgotten to wipe his shoes, and a muddy mark on the polished floor, which completely hid a tiny scratch, made one of the policemen glance up at his superior officer with a look of annoyance. Ralph had taxed their patience severely already, for he had been following closely at their heels for the last half-hour, pouring out remarks and suggestions in his own superior, self-confident way, quite regardless of their civil hints that they could get on better with their work if he left them to find out things for themselves.

The inspector noticed the glance at once. There was very little that his sharp eyes did not notice.

‘I think, sir,’ he said, turning to Mr Osbourne, ‘we would get on quicker without the children. The fewer people who are about at this sort of thing the better.’

‘Yes, to be sure,’ replied Mr Osbourne, who had not noticed that there were any of them downstairs until Ralph’s noisy interruption.—‘Go and have your breakfast at once, boys.—Mary, will you go with them and see to it? We will call you if we want you. And afterwards, see that they all go up to the playroom, or somewhere where they will be out of the way.’

‘But, father,’ began Ralph lingering behind the others, not choosing to consider himself included in an order to the children, ‘do you hear what I am saying? I found out that the summer-house windows are broken, and surely that is a clue.’

‘Hold your tongue, Ralph, and do as you are bid,’ said his father sharply. ‘We found all that out long before you were up; so go along and have your breakfast with the others, and don’t let me find you bothering about down here again.’

Ralph, who was afraid of his father, dared not argue the point further, but he went out of the hall with a frown on his face. He had a great idea of his own importance, and he did not care to be snubbed in this way before the servants, and told to stay out of the way as if he were six years old. There was no help for it, however, so he followed the others to the servants’ hall with the best grace he could, and found that Mary had already poured out the tea and was good-naturedly answering the many questions which Ronald and Vivian were showering upon her.

‘’Tis clear that the thieves got in by the conservatory, Master Vivian,’ she was saying as Ralph entered and sat down sullenly in the place which had been left vacant for him, ‘for they have cut a great circle clean out of the glass just behind the stables; and then I suppose one of them put in his hand and unlocked the door, for Hunter found it open this morning, and he locked it himself last night. They seem to have carried out the silver that way too, and a nice lot of it they have got, more’s the pity, for Mason picked up one of the best silver forks just a stone’s-throw down the drive. None of us maids have been allowed to go out; but we heard the policeman say as how a cart must have waited on the road just outside the gate—the wheel-marks can be seen quite plainly—and they must have put it all into that, and carted it away. Like as not it is all melted down by this time. I’ve heard people say that these thieves are such sharp ones they melt all their things at once.’

‘What for?’ asked Claude, pausing with his mug of milk half-way to his mouth. ‘It would spoil all the things if they were melted.’

‘Not to let people know whose things they were,’ explained Ronald with a smile, taking up a teaspoon. ‘You see, Claude, here is W. O. on the end of this, or ought to be, though I can’t see it. Well, if the police found a teaspoon with W. O. on it in any one’s house—any one whom he thought was likely to steal, I mean—he would know that the teaspoons were Uncle Walter’s, and that the people in the house had stolen them.’

‘You won’t find any letters on the end of any of these teaspoons, worse luck! Master Ronald,’ said Mary. ‘These are the kitchen spoons, the only ones that are left. The rogues knew what to take and what to leave, and they did not touch any of the kitchen things.’

‘Where’s my christening-mug?’ asked Claude suddenly, noticing for the first time that he was using a plain white china cup instead of the solid silver mug which his godfather, a rich old gentleman in India, had given him.

‘Melted,’ said Ralph maliciously, while Mary murmured, ‘I’m afraid it has gone with the rest of the things, Master Claude. You know it always stood on the sideboard in the dining-room, along with the really good silver.’

‘But my name was on it,’ said Claude, the tears rising in his round blue eyes at the thought of losing his mug, which he had had all his life, and of which he was very proud. ‘My whole name is on it, “Claude Alexander Osbourne,” and my date.’

‘All the more reason why they should melt it,’ went on Ralph, who was in the mood to tease his little brother, and with whom the Indian mug had always been rather a sore subject. He was the eldest, and he had always felt that the mug, and the rich godfather too, should have belonged to him, instead of to Claude; for his godfathers, two old clergymen, had only given him a Bible and a prayer-book, which in his mind were very mean gifts compared to Isobel’s case containing a silver knife and fork and spoon, which she had got at her christening, and Claude’s silver mug.

‘Hush, Master Claude,’ said Mary, as she saw the big tears begin to roll down the little boy’s face at his brother’s unkind words; ‘don’t vex your heart about the mug. They say that the man from Scotland Yard can find out anything, and he will be sure to catch the thieves long before they have had time to melt all the things. And your mug was so solid it would take a long time to melt.

‘As for you, Master Ralph,’ she went on, ‘if I were a big boy like you I would be ashamed to tease a little one and make him cry, when there is so much trouble and worry in the house. Dear, dear! there, you have set him off, and you know how long it will be before he stops; and what will your father say, with Miss Isobel so ill?’

‘How is Isobel?’ asked Ronald, suddenly remembering what Anne had said when she called him, and noticing almost for the first time that neither she nor Aunt Dora had ever appeared.

‘She isn’t at all well,’ said Mary gravely. ‘The mistress has been up since five o’clock with her. ’Twas then the robbery was found out. Mistress went down into the dining-room to get some soda-water—Miss Isobel was sick—and she found it all in an upturn.—Oh, do be quiet, Master Claude,’ she added in a worried tone. ‘The doctor said that Miss Isobel was to be kept quiet, and here you are roaring like a bull of Bashan.—It’s all your fault, that’s what it is, Master Ralph. And, oh dear, there’s the master calling!’

Just then Uncle Walter’s voice sounded sharply from the hall.

‘Who is that making such a noise?’ he asked. ‘Be quiet, Claude, at once, do you hear?—Mary, surely you can keep him quiet. We cannot have a noise like that in the house to-day.’

But the sharp note in his father’s voice only made matters worse, and in spite of Mary’s threats and promises and offers of sundry lumps of toffee which she would get out of her box when the policemen would let her go upstairs, if he would only be quiet, Claude went on crying till he bade fair to go into one of the screaming-fits for which he had been noted as a baby, but which he seemed quite to have outgrown.

As a matter of fact, the confusion and mystery which had suddenly overtaken his usually orderly home had quite upset the little fellow’s nerves, and it needed very little to make him lose his self-control. Poor Mary was in despair; but Ronald, who had a wonderful way with children, came to the rescue. His own little sister Dorothy was a very excitable child, and Mrs Armitage often said that she did not know what she would have done without her eldest son, who could soothe and quiet the little girl when every one else was helpless.

‘Come on, Claude,’ he said cheerily, pushing back his chair, ‘I’ve finished breakfast now, and we will go out and see Monarch. We will take these bits of sausage, and perhaps Mrs Mason will allow us to give them to him to-day. I shouldn’t wonder if his breakfast had been forgotten when every one has been so busy.’

‘Oh, Master Ronald, haven’t you heard?’ began Mary, ‘poor Monarch’—— and then she stopped, for Claude ceased crying for a minute to listen to what she had to say about his pet. It had suddenly occurred to her that the news she had to tell would not help to comfort the little boy.

‘I think you had better not go into the courtyard,’ she went on hurriedly, with a warning look at Ronald, ‘not just now, at least, for the hole they cut in the conservatory is just above Monarch’s kennel. You know how the conservatory comes quite close to the courtyard near there, and the inspector didn’t seem to want any one about. He says that if there are any footsteps they will be all trodden away if any one goes to look.’

‘All right,’ said sensible Ronald, who saw clearly that there was some other reason which Mary did not wish to give. ‘We’ll go into the greenhouse instead, and see if we can catch any little green frogs among the ferns by the tank.’

This was a favourite occupation of Isobel’s and Claude’s, though it was not very often allowed; but to-day Ronald thought that he could take the responsibility upon himself, and Mary heartily seconded his proposal. So Claude went off quietly with his big cousin to get his boots and gaiters, while the two other boys only waited till the door was shut behind them to fall on Mary with eager questions.

‘Why did I not want him to go into the courtyard, Master Ralph? Because the poor beast that he is so fond of is stone dead, murdered by those scoundrels so that he couldn’t bark and they might begin their work in peace. If Monarch had been alive I warrant they wouldn’t have cut their hole so easily; he would have roused the whole of Hampstead first.’

‘Monarch dead!’ said both the boys at once. Ralph felt a lump rise in his throat at the news, for the gentle animal had been a favourite with all the children, while Vivian sat and gazed vaguely out of the window, a great fear rising in his heart.

‘How did they kill him?’ asked Ralph at last, and his voice was rather husky.

‘They poisoned him,’ said Mary, beginning to put the plates together with great energy. ‘Mason found half of a bit of nasty yellow pastry lying in his kennel; he had eaten the rest. It had been made with some poisonous stuff, the policeman said, and the poor brute was stone dead, and quite stiff when they found him. But, anyway, he did not suffer, for a mercy, for he was curled up quite peaceful like, just as if he had gone to sleep.—But, bless me, Master Vivian, whats the matter with you next?’ she exclaimed in alarm, for Vivian, who had risen suddenly to his feet, turned perfectly white, and, after one or two feeble attempts to steady himself by holding on to the back of a chair, fell forward on the floor in a dead faint.