him with scorn. “Fancy bothering about your beastly dinner when your br—I mean when the Baby”—Jane whispered hotly. Robert carefully winked at her and went on:

“You won’t mind my just running home to get our dinner?” he said to the gipsy; “I can bring it out here in a basket.”

His brother and sisters felt themselves very noble, and despised him. They did not know his thoughtful secret intention. But the gipsies did in a minute.

“Oh yes!” they said; “and then fetch the police with a pack of lies about it being your baby instead of ours! D’jever catch a weasel asleep?” they asked.

“If you’re hungry you can pick a bit along of us,” said the light-haired gipsy woman, not unkindly. “Here, Levi, that blessed kid’ll howl all his buttons off. Give him to the little lady, and let’s see if they can’t get him used to us a bit.”

So the Lamb was handed back; but the gipsies crowded so closely that he could not possibly stop howling. Then the man with the red handkerchief said:

“Here, Pharaoh, make up the fire; and you girls see to the pot. Give the kid a chanst.” So the gipsies, very much against their will, went off to their work, and the children and the Lamb were left sitting on the grass.

“He’ll be all right at sunset,” Jane whispered. “But, oh, it is awful! Suppose they are frightfully angry when they come to their senses! They might beat us, or leave us tied to trees, or something.”

“No, they won’t,” Anthea said. (“Oh, my Lamb, don’t cry any more, it’s all right, Panty’s got oo, duckie!”) “They aren’t unkind people, or they wouldn’t be going to give us any dinner.”

“Dinner?” said Robert. “I won’t touch their nasty dinner. It would choke me!”

The others thought so too then. But when the dinner was ready—it turned out to be supper, and happened between four and five—they were all glad enough to take what they could get. It was boiled rabbit, with onions, and some bird rather like a chicken, but stringier about its legs and with a stronger taste. The Lamb had bread soaked in hot water and brown sugar sprinkled on the top. He liked this very much, and consented to let the two gipsy women feed him with it, as he sat on Anthea’s lap. All that long hot afternoon Robert and Cyril and Anthea and Jane had to keep the Lamb amused and happy, while the gipsies looked eagerly on. By the time the shadows grew long and black across the meadows he had really “taken to” the woman with the light hair, and even consented to kiss his hand to the children, and to stand up and bow, with his hand on his chest—“like a gentleman”—to the two men. The whole gipsy camp was in raptures with him, and his brothers and sisters could not help taking some pleasure in showing off his accomplishments to an audience so interested and enthusiastic. But they longed for sunset.

“We’re getting into the habit of longing for sunset,” Cyril whispered. “How I do wish we could wish something really sensible, that would be of some use, so that we should be quite sorry when sunset came.

The shadows got longer and longer, and at last there were no separate shadows any more, but one soft glowing shadow over everything; for the sun was out of sight—behind the hill—but he had not really set yet. The people who make the laws about lighting bicycle lamps are the people who decide when the sun sets; he has to do it, too, to the minute, or they would know the reason why!

But the gipsies were getting impatient.

“Now, young uns,” the red-handkerchief man said, “it’s time you were laying of your heads on your pillowses—so it is! The kid’s all right and friendly with us now—so you just hand him over and sling that hook o’ yoursaj like you said.”

The women and children came crowding round the Lamb, arms were held out, fingers snapped invitingly, friendly faces beaming with admiring smiles; but all failed to tempt the loyal Lamb. He clung with arms and legs to Jane, who happened to be holding him, and uttered the gloomiest roar of the whole day.

“It’s no good,” the woman said, “hand the little popperak over, miss. We’ll soon quiet him.”

And still the sun would not set.

“Tell her about how to put him to bed,” whispered Cyril; “anything to gain time—and be ready to bolt when the