We had looked for a long time before Mrs. Pettigrew came in with a parcel she said the butcher had left. It was not addressed, but we knew it was H.O.'s, because of the label on the paper from the shop where Father gets his shirts. Father opened it at once. Inside the parcel we found H.O.'s boots and braces, his best hat and his chest-protector. And Oswald felt as if we had found his skeleton. "Any row with any of you?" Father asked. But there hadn't been any. "Was he worried about anything? Done anything wrong, and afraid to own up?" We turned cold, for we knew what he meant. That parcel was so horribly like the lady's hat and gloves that she takes off on the seashore and leaves with a letter saying it has come to this. "_No_, _no_, NO, NO!" we all said. "He was perfectly jolly all the morning." Then suddenly Dicky leaned on the table and one of H.O.'s boots toppled over, and there was something white inside. It was a letter. H.O. must have written it before we left home. It said-- "DEAR FATHER AND EVERY ONE,--I am going to be a Clown. When I am rich and reveared I will come back rolling. "Your affectionate son, "HORACE OCTAVIUS BASTABLE." "Rolling?" Father said. "He means rolling in money," Alice said. Oswald noticed that every one round the table where H.O.'s boots were dignifiedly respected as they lay, was a horrid pale colour, like when the salt is thrown into snapdragons. "Oh dear!" Dora cried, "that was it. He asked me to make him a clown's dress and keep it deeply secret. He said he wanted to surprise Aunt Margaret and Albert's uncle. And I didn't think it was wrong," said Dora, screwing up her face; she then added, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh, oh!" and with these concluding remarks she began to howl. Father thumped her on the back in an absent yet kind way. "But where's he gone?" he said, not to any one in particular. "I saw the butcher; he said H.O. asked him to take a parcel home and went back round the Cedars." Here Dicky coughed and said-- "I didn't think he meant anything, but the day after Noel was talking about singing ballads in Rome, and getting poet's lyres given him, H.O. did say if Noel had been really keen on the Roman lyres and things he could easily have been a stowaway, and gone unknown." "A stowaway!" said my Father, sitting down suddenly and hard. "In Aunt Margaret's big dress basket--the one she let him hide in when we had hide-and-seek there. He talked a lot about it after Noel had said that about the lyres--and the Italians being so poetical, you know. You remember that day we had toffee." My Father is prompt and decisive in action, so is his eldest son. "I'm off to the Cedars," he said. "Do let me come, Father," said the decisive son. "You may want to send a message." So in a moment Father was on his bike and Oswald on the step--a dangerous but delightful spot--and off to the Cedars.