“And she tells Gums _everything_, and they say, ‘it’s been such a relief to talk matters over and get something settled,’” Lottie contributed towards enlightenment. She was a child who could usually be trusted by her elders not to tittle-tattle, but William need not suppose he was unrivalled in the intelligence department. “Stanley--Aunt Lavvy--Gums----” Ursula sat sideways on the big rocking-horse, her small smooth head, with its lustreless gold hair brushed back to a long plait, tilted against the wallpaper, on which the legend of Miss Muffet and the spider was stamped in nauseous pale-blue-and-mustard repetition. “Hasn’t anything funny struck you about just those three being against us?” “Against Hal, you mean?” “Isn’t it the same thing?” Silence duly acknowledged that it was. Nina might be horrified, and Bunny shocked, and William tactlessly quick to emphasize a Bunny no longer inferior, but even in their disillusion they were all untried in the endeavor not to let Hal’s humiliation escape beyond the radius of the Laburnums itself. “Well, what about them?” asked Lottie. “I know.” Bunny listlessly supplied the correct answer to Ursula’s flung question. “They’re just the only three in the house who aren’t family.” Ursula nodded at him. “And it’s a mistake to have people living with you who don’t belong to the family,” she said. “In a crisis, they’re black-legs.” She was not sure of the exact meaning of black-legs, but it expressed her secret angry conviction of a citadel betrayed from within. “I don’t believe Aunt Lavvy’s really not one of us, and I’m going to her now,” and Nina dashed off in a spasm of fierce impulsive energy. “We should look awf’ly silly,” Lottie remarked after a pause, “if she came back and said that Aunt Lavvy said that _of course_ she wouldn’t tell on Hal, and never meant to, and why hadn’t any of us asked her about it before.” William chimed in: “After all, no one except Hal himself and Mother have heard Aunt Lavvy say a word about telling Mr. Fennimore when he comes to supper tomorrow.” “Is _that_ when she means to, William? Who told you?” It proved on closer examination that William had not been told. It had just drifted into his consciousness that Sunday evening after supper was the time when Aunt Lavvy would elect to inform Buckler’s Cross and the world that Hal Maxwell was a thief. They had all wondered _exactly_ when ... but uncertainty penned them in no longer. Somehow they felt William had answered the unspoken query correctly. “I shouldn’t be s’prised if Bunny went to Oxford now,” continued William in thoughtful tones. Immediately, he was smote upon the head. “Why the devil should I?” demanded the second son of the Maxwells. “Well--” William was in no way perturbed, “now that everything’s changed----” “_Nothing’s_ changed!” And then Nina returned to them with the expression of one who has dashed her head with violence into hard clear glass where she expected to find only air.