_"Looking!"_ exclaimed Uncle Felix, picking out the word. He moved closer; the children caught his hands; the three of them sheltered against the spreading figure till the four together seemed like a single item of the landscape. "Looking!" he repeated, "that's odd. We've lost something too. You said too,--just now--something about--a sign, I think?" Uncle Felix added shyly. All waited, but the Tramp gave no direct reply. He smiled again and folded two mighty arms about them. Two big feathery wings seemed round them. Judy thought of a nest, Tim of a cozy rabbit hole, Uncle Felix had the amazing impression that there were wild flowers growing in his heart, or that a flock of robins had hopped in and began to sing. "Lost something, have you?" the Tramp enquired genially at length; and the slow, leisurely way he said it, the curious half-singing utterance he used, the words falling from his great beard with this sound as of wind through leaves or water over sand and pebbles--somehow included them in the rhythm of existence to which he himself naturally belonged. They all seemed part of the garden, part of the day, part of the sun and earth and flowers together, marvellously linked and caught within some common purpose. Question and answer in the ordinary sense were wrong and useless. They must _feel_--feel as he did--to find what they sought. It was Uncle Felix who presently replied: "Something--we've--mis-laid," he said hesitatingly, as though a little ashamed that he expressed the truth so lamely. "Mis-laid?" asked the Tramp. "Mis-laid, eh?" "Forgotten," put in Tim. "Mis-laid or forgotten," repeated the other. "That all?" "Some_body_, I should have said," explained Uncle Felix yet still falteringly, "somebody we've lost, that is." "Hiding," Tim said quickly. "About," added Judy. There was a hush in all their voices. The Tramp picked the small feather from his beard--apparently a water-wagtail's--and appeared to reflect a moment. He held the soft feather tenderly between a thumb and finger that were thick as a walking-stick and stained with roadside mud and yellow with flower-pollen too. "Hiding, is he?" He held up the feather as if to see which way it fluttered in the wind. "Hiding?" he repeated, with a distinct broadening of the smile that was already big enough to cover half the lawn. It shone out of him almost like rays of light, of sunshine, of fire. "Aha! That's his way, maybe, just a little way he has--of playing with you." "You know him, then! You know who it is?" two eager voices asked instantly. "Tell us at once. You're leader now!" The children, in their excitement, almost burrowed into him; Uncle Felix drew a deep breath and stared. His whole body listened.