here, having entered the room in silence, swathed in a sheet, and wriggling snake-wise along the floor. He had coloured his face purple from Margery’s paint-box, and, having serpentined along till he was in front of her, suddenly yelled and disclosed the horrors of that apoplectic countenance. On that occasion the gurgling cistern had been useful, for he swiftly washed his own face to reassure her. But, by a variation of the rules, it having been ordained that the frightener should enter the room first and get himself up to receive the frightened on entry, Margery had got back her own again, for she had chalked her face and put her tongue out, and lain down in the coffin-shaped box, closing the lid as usual. David had looked for her with quaking tremors behind the cistern, and found her not; he had peered into the darkest of all corners, where an empty bookcase concealed a dangerous recess, when suddenly the lid of the coffin-box, which he had not suspected, flew open, disclosing Margery lying quite still, with white face and protruding tongue. . . . David had run as far as the nursery-landing before he could master the panic of his legs. Clearly, then, there was, or rather had been, advantages in this house, but to-day as Margery and David sat idly beneath the mulberry-tree in the garden, from which every now and then a fat sun-ripened fruit plopped on to the grass, David announced that there was no more savour in these childish things. Margery was a year older than he, but, being a girl, and already turned fifteen, and he a boy who had but last week celebrated his fourteenth birthday (his father had given him a copy of the “Christian Year,” for which he had very little use) she was essentially some five years his senior, and knew how David felt. “Yes, it used to be ripping,” he said discontentedly, in allusion to those years, “and I used to be awfully excited, but I don’t care now. You see the point was that we _were_ frightened: that was the ripping part of it. Besides, you know, if any of the fellows at Adams’s asked me what sort of games we played at home, it would be sickening to have to say that we just hid behind boxes in a frowsty attic. ’Tain’t no use any more! So what are we to do all this afternoon and to-morrow and the next day? It’s funny that you can’t suggest something else.” Margery gave a long sigh and ate one of the fallen mulberries. She would have given anything to be able to suggest something else. In appearance she was so like David that if brother and sister had dressed in the other’s clothes, and corrected the discrepancy of hair and broken front tooth, either might have passed a frontier with the passport of the other. “Well, I’ve suggested heaps of things, and you say they are all rot,” she said. “I’ll play anything you like. We used to have rather fun playing cricket. Wouldn’t you like to play cricket?”