“The policeman turned my pockets out, but only found a small curtain-ring, with which I had been betrothed to Nelly a day or two before. (She had another like it; we couldn’t wear them on our fingers, so we kept them always in our pockets.) “‘Cook, take the policeman to search his room,’ said Miss Pringle, with another shake. “Cook and policeman went down the garden. Miss Pringle locked the door and pocketed the key. ‘I don’t accuse you,’ she said, ‘but I must take precautions.’ “It was now that I first thought of the money in my drawer. I turned hot all over, and felt my head swimming. “‘Please, ma’am,’ I stammered, ‘there’s money in my room, but I was given it by a——’ “‘Don’t incriminate yourself,’ said she, coldly and precisely; ‘there are no witnesses present. Silence.’ “The cook and policeman came up the garden; I can hear their footsteps on the gravel now, and the ticking of Miss Pringle’s neat-faced clock. It was half-past four by that clock, I remember—my tea-time, and the time when I usually fed Mag. The thought rushed into my head, if I am taken up what will Mag do? How am I to tell Nelly? “They knocked at the door, which Miss Pringle unlocked. The policeman put the money he had found on the desk in front of her, and put his hand on my shoulder. The cook sobbed, the clock ticked; no one said anything; Miss Pringle looked away from me, and I really think she was sorry. “At last she looked up and opened her tight lips, but what she was going to say I never knew, for at that moment I made a bolt through the window, upsetting the neat geraniums in their pots, and tumbling headlong into the flower-bed which I had tidied in the morning, I scudded down the garden into the yard, over the gate into the paddock, through the hedge, and away at full speed in the direction of Nelly’s cottage. “I can recollect all quite clearly now, up to the moment when I saw the policeman running after me and gaining ground while I struggled through a hedge. Then I got wild and heated, I suppose, and I remember nothing more distinctly. But Nelly says that I came rushing into their garden, shouting to her, ‘Look after Mag,’ for the police were after me for stealing. She thought at first I was at one of my games, and told me to run off and climb up a tree, and she would bring me food; and I was just going off towards the three elms when the policeman ran in and collared me, and then she fought him and called him names till her mother came out and dragged her away. This is what she told me months afterwards.