He tried in vain to slip back into sleep, but the chanting persisted, so he turned over and groped, as he always did, for his spectacles beside the bed. Even before he had them on he realized that his room was glowing with the gold of the afternoon sun and that something even redder was between the bed and the window.

"Penny," he growled, "why can't you leave me alone? I suppose I've got to lock myself in to be safe from you... You know I'm no good in the morning... Go away!"

"But it isn't morning. It's nearly tea-time, and I've been awake half an hour and nobody seems to be about, so I thought we'd have a talk at once - just us two, Jon, if you see what I mean?"

"I know what you mean when you say just the two of us! Even I can grasp that. But you will come butting in at such stupid times, Penny. I'm still unconscious and I want to go to sleep again."

"Will you be decent if I go and get you a cup of tea?" she asked. "I promise I won't fool about, Jon; but we must make up our minds what we're going to tell the grown-ups, and if we go down Auntie or somebody will grab us and we shan't know what to say."

Jon sat up. She looked very nice and clean and fresh, he thought, and not a bit as if she had spent last night in a gale marooned on the top of a storm-swept hill. Funny how girls managed this sometimes! He ran his fingers through his hair and yawned.

"You all right, Newpenny? Not pneumonia or anything?"

She gave him a relieved and radiant smile. He was going to be decent after all!

"I'm fine, Jon. My poor old bones ache a bit, though. Are you stiff?"

"At the moment my legs are paralysed," he said, "but I expect that's because you're sitting on them... Get off and we'll see if I'm likely to be bedridden."

"We'll pretend you are and I've come to visit you. Poor Jonathan. How awful for you!" and she got off the bed and went over to the window and drew back the curtains. When she spoke again she had her back to him.

"P'raps I was wrong about not telling the grown-ups," she began. "Maybe we wouldn't have got into that mess yesterday if we'd told your mother about what we had found upstairs and all about the clues and everything."