"Well--so I thought if Noel's a cowardy custard I'm not--and I wasn't afraid of being in the basket, though it was quite dark till I cut the air-holes with my knife in the railway van. I think I cut the string off the label. It fell off afterwards, and I saw it through the hole, but of course I couldn't say anything. I thought they'd look after their silly luggage better than that. It was all their fault I was lost." "Tell us how you did it, H.O. dear," Dora said; "never mind about it being everybody else's fault." "It's yours as much as any one's, if you come to that," H.O. said. "You made me the clown dress when I asked you. You never said a word about not. So there!" "Oh, H.O., you _are_ unkind!" Dora said. "You know you said it was for a surprise for the bridal pair." "So it would have been, if they'd found me at Rome, and I'd popped up like what I meant to--like a jack-in-the-box--and said, 'Here we are again!' in my clown's clothes, at them. But it's all spoiled, and father's going to speak to me this evening." H.O. sniffed every time he stopped speaking. But we did not correct him then. We wanted to hear about everything. "Why didn't you tell me straight out what you were going to do?" Dicky asked. "Because you'd jolly well have shut me up. You always do if I want to do anything you haven't thought of yourself." "What did you take with you, H.O.?" asked Alice in a hurry, for H.O. was now sniffing far beyond a whisper. "Oh, I'd saved a lot of grub, only I forgot it at the last. It's under the chest of drawers in our room. And I had my knife--and I changed into the clown's dress in the cupboard at the Ashleighs--over my own things because I thought it would be cold. And then I emptied the rotten girl's clothes out and hid them--and the top-hatted tray I just put it on a chair near, and I got into the basket, and I lifted the tray up over my head and sat down and fitted it down over me--it's got webbing bars, you know, across it. And none of you would ever have thought of it, let alone doing it." "I should hope not," Dora said, but H.O. went on unhearing. "I began to think perhaps I wished I hadn't directly they strapped up the basket. It was beastly hot and stuffy--I had to cut an air-hole in the cart, and I cut my thumb; it was so bumpety. And they threw me about as if I was coals--and wrong way up as often as not. And the train was awful wobbly, and I felt so sick, and if I'd had the grub I couldn't have eaten it. I had a bottle of water. And that was all right till I dropped the cork, and I couldn't find it in the dark till the water got upset, and then I found the cork that minute.