"What on earth can they find to enjoy in this awful smell?" he wondered, when he entered the Small Cats' House to drag them out. The house was empty except for a bored keeper thinking of his tea. "Have you seen two children?" John asked, anxiously. "No, sir, this is the Small Cats' House," replied the keeper. "Children," repeated John, irritably. "No, sir. Or, yes, I believe there _was_ a little boy and a little girl in here, but they've been gone some minutes now. It's closing time," he added, significantly. John rushed miserably along deserted paths through the dusk, looking everywhere for Bertram and Viola without success. "All out," was being shouted from every direction. "Two children," he panted to a keeper by the exit. "All out" "But two children are lost in the Gardens." "Closing time, sir. They must have gone out by another gate." He herded John through the turnstile into the street as he would have herded a recalcitrant gnu into its inclosure. "But this is terrible," John lamented. "This is appalling. I've lost George's children." He hailed a taxi, drove to the nearest police-station, left their descriptions, and directed the driver to Halma House, Earl's Court Square. CHAPTER VII John came to the conclusion while he was driving to Earl's Court that the distinctive anxiety in losing two children was to be sought for in an acute consciousness of their mobility. He had often enough lost such articles as sovereigns, and matchboxes, and income-tax demands; but in the disappearance of these he had always been consoled by the knowledge that they were stationary in some place or another at any given moment, and that somebody or another must find them at some time or another, with profit or disappointment to himself. But Bertram and Viola might be anywhere; if at this moment they were somewhere, before the taxi had turned the next corner they might be somewhere else. The only kind of loss comparable to this was the loss of a train, in which case also the victim was dismayed by the thought of its mobility. Moreover, was it logically possible to find two children, any more than it was possible to find a lost train? They could be caught like a train by somebody else; but except among gipsies, who were practically extinct, the sport of catching children was nowadays unknown. The classic instance of two lost children--and by the way an uncle came into that--was _The Babes in the Wood_, in which story they were neither caught nor found, though certainly their bodies were found owing to the eccentric behavior of some birds in the vicinity. It would be distressing to read in the paper to-morrow of two children's having been found under a drift of paper-bags in the bear-pit at the Zoo, hugged to death not by each other, but by the bears. Or they might have hidden themselves in the Reptile House--Bertram had displayed a dreadful curiosity about the effect of standing upon one of the alligators--and their fate might