THE WOULDBEGOODS
tion by some ungenerous murmurs about our not being so jolly clever as we thought ourselves.
There was a very far from pleasing silence. Then Oswald got up. He said:
"Alice, come here a sec., I want to speak to you."
As Albert's uncle had offered no advice, Oswald disdained to ask him for any.
Alice got up too, and she and Oswald went into the garden, and sat down on the bench under the quince-tree, and wished they had never tried to have a private lark of their very own with the Antiquities—"A Private Sale," Albert's uncle called it afterwards. But regrets, as nearly always happens, were vain. Something had to be done.
But what?
Oswald and Alice sat in silent desperateness, and the voices of the gay and careless others came to them from the lawn, where, heartless in their youngness, they were playing tag. I don't know how they could. Oswald would not like to play tag when his brother and sister were in a hole, but Oswald is an exception to some boys. But Dicky told me afterwards he thought it was only a joke of Albert's uncle's.
The dusk grew dusker, till you could hardly tell the quinces from the leaves, and Alice and Oswald still sat exhausted with hard thinking, but they could not think of anything. And it grew so dark that the moonlight began to show.
Then Alice jumped up—just as Oswald was
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