the children’s heads on the finger of an impossible Mabel, who was, indeed, twelve feet high.

“Now you’ve done it!” said Gerald—and he was right. It was in vain that Mabel asserted that the ring was a wishing-ring. It quite clearly wasn’t; it was what she had said it was.

“And you can’t tell at all how long the effect will last,” said Gerald. “Look at the invisibleness.” This is difficult to do, but the others understood him.

“It may last for days,” said Kathleen. “Oh, Mabel, it was silly of you!”

“That’s right, rub it in,” said Mabel bitterly; “you should have believed me when I said it was what I said it was. Then I shouldn’t have had to show you, and I shouldn’t be this silly size. What am I to do now, I should like to know?”

“We must conceal you till you get your right size again—that’s all,” said Gerald practically.

“Yes—but where?” said Mabel, stamping a foot twenty-four inches long.

“In one of the empty rooms. You wouldn’t be afraid?”

“Of course not,” said Mabel. “Oh, I do wish we’d just put the ring back and left it.”

“Well, it wasn’t us that didn’t,” said Jimmy, with more truth than grammar.

“I shall put it back now,” said Mabel, tugging at it.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Gerald thoughtfully. “You don’t want to stay that length, do you? And unless the ring’s on your finger when the time’s up, I dare say it wouldn’t act.”

The exalted Mabel sullenly touched the spring. The panels slowly slid into place, and all the bright jewels were hidden. Once more the room was merely eight-sided, panelled, sunlit, and unfurnished.

“Now,” said Mabel, “where am I to hide? It’s a good thing auntie gave me leave to stay the night with you. As it is, one of you will have to stay the night with me. I’m not going to be left alone, the silly height I am.”

Height was the right word; Mabel had said “four yards high”—and she was four yards high. But she was hardly any thicker than when her height was four feet seven, and the effect was, as Gerald remarked, “wonderfully worm-like.” Her clothes had, of course, grown with her, and she looked like a little girl reflected in one of those long bent mirrors at Rosherville Gardens, that make stout people look so happily slender, and slender people so sadly scraggy.9 She sat down suddenly on the floor, and it was like a four-fold foot-rule folding itself up.

“It’s no use sitting there, girl,” said Gerald.

“I’m not sitting here,” retorted Mabel; “I only got down so as to be able to get through the door. It’ll have to be hands and knees through most places for me now, I suppose.”

She sat down suddenly on the floor

“Aren’t you hungry?” Jimmy asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” said Mabel desolately; “it’s—it’s such a long way ill”

“Well, I’ll scout,” said Gerald; “if the coast’s clear—”

“Look here,” said Mabel, “I think I’d rather be out of doors till it gets dark.”

“You can’t. Someone’s certain to see you.”

“Not if I go through the yew-hedge,” said Mabel. “There’s a yew-hedge with a passage along its inside like the box-hedge in The Luck of the Vails.ep

“In what?”

“The Luck of the Vails. It’s a ripping book. It was that book first set me on to hunt for hidden doors in panels and things. If I crept along that on my front, like a serpent—it comes out amongst the rhododendrons, close by the dinosaurus—we could camp there.”

“There’s tea,” said Gerald, who had had no dinner.

“That’s just what there isn’t,” said Jimmy, who had had none either.

“Oh, you won’t desert me!” said Mabel. “Look here—I’ll write to auntie. She’ll give you the things for a picnic, if she’s there and awake. If she isn’t, one of the maids will.”

So she wrote on a leaf of Gerald’s invaluable pocket-book:—

“Dearest Auntie,—

“Please may we have some things for a picnic? Gerald will bring them. I would come myself, but I am a little tired. I think I have been growing rather fast.—Your loving niece,

”Mabel.

“P.S.—Lots, please, because some of us are very hungry.”

It was found difficult, but possible, for Mabel to creep along the tunnel in the yew-hedge. Possible, but slow, so that the three had hardly had time to settle themselves among the rhododendrons and to wonder bitterly what on earth Gerald was up to, to be such a time gone, when he returned, panting under the weight of a covered basket. He dumped it down on the fine grass