"Me best 'at," said Eliza, and there was a silence with sniffs in it.
"Look here," said Mabel, "you cheer up. Just you think this is all a dream. It's just the kind of thing you might dream if your conscience had got pains in it about the ring."
"But will I wake up again?"
"Oh yes, you'll wake up again. Now we're going to bandage your eyes and take you through a very small door, and don't you resist, or we'll bring a policeman into the dream like a shot."
I have not time to describe Eliza's entrance into the cave. She went head first: the girls propelled and the boys received her. If Gerald had not thought of tying her hands someone would certainly have been scratched. As it was Mabel's hand was scraped between the cold rock and a passionate boot-heel. Nor will I tell you all that she said as they led her along the fern-bordered gully and through the arch into the wonderland of Italian scenery. She had but little language left when they removed her bandage under a weeping willow where a statue of Diana, bow in hand, stood poised on one toe a most unsuitable attitude for archery, I have always thought.
"Now," said Gerald, "it's all over—nothing but niceness now and cake and things."
"It's time we did have our tea," said Jimmy. And it was.
Eliza, once convinced that her chest, though invisible, was not transparent, and that her
