"No, it's too risky," admitted her brother. "When that big dark thing came in sight there was so little time to think what to do. That second, too," he added with a shudder, "when I thought the brute had got you, was too awful!" She felt quite important now at having gone through such peril. "I could never have imagined that birds had such a lot to put up with," mused Cyril as they walked on--"hunger and suffering, with the risk any moment of being gobbled up!" "There ought to be some one to take care of the poor things," remarked Dulcie. "If it hadn't been for the catseyes we should have been eaten up and ended like that." She glanced at the bracelet on her wrist and added, with a timid look at her brother, "It seems safer as we are." "Bosh!" he rejoined. "We want adventures. That's what we're going for--and freedom. We had a ripping time as larks--till the end. It certainly wasn't very comfortable then." CHAPTER IV THE LOST CATSEYE Something was in their path; the Twins stooped to examine it and found it to be a Hedgehog standing on its hind legs, motionless, as though waiting for somebody, and a smile was upon the face of that Hedgehog. All at once a Porcupine sprung up beside it, as if out of the earth, and the two appeared on the very best of terms. "I _must_ get to know what they are talking about," exclaimed Dulcie. "They seem to me to be arguing about something interesting. Oh, I do wish I could be all ears and understand them! If only I were something as small as a mole!" Before Cyril could remonstrate a mole she was, went off blindly, and was quickly lost to view amongst the thick brushwood. "I say! I do call that _mean_," he complained. "Without even so much as asking my advice or saying good-bye. It's silly to become a stupid mole; it's a waste of a catseye. And all on account of a beastly spikey hedgehog and a beastly prickly porcupine. Halloa! Wherever have you all got to?" Out of humour, he looked right and left. They were nowhere to be seen. "I hope she will soon come to her senses!" he muttered. "It isn't much fun being left like this." He lay down on his back to await her, and kicked up his legs in the air as a pastime, whilst the tall trees above him waved their upper branches in the breeze. His glittering bracelet caught his attention, causing his thoughts to drift on adventures past and to come. He looked harder at it, and becoming concerned he carefully counted the missing catseyes. He had only wished to be a lark, and to be himself. Yet THREE were gone! The two first--and the _last_ one! "Could this," he asked himself, "be some dreadful trick of the Wizard's--likely to occur at the last?" Cyril turned pale at the possibility. "Or could that last one have become loose and got lost?" he pondered. If so, he realised that it must be found. The thought about the Wizard worried him. He was uneasy, too, about Dulcie, and sat up eagerly listening for her coming, and wondering what he had better do.