They were all sitting in a tight circle round the handkerchief, Regie watching Hester cutting a new supply of plates out of smooth leaves with her little gilt scissors, while Mary and Stella tried alternately to suck an inaccessible grain of sugar out of the bottom of an acorn cup.

Rachel and Dick had come up on their silent wheels, and were looking at them over the wall before Hester was aware of their presence.

“May we join the tea-party?” asked Rachel, and Hester started violently.

“I am afraid the gate is locked,” she said.  “But perhaps you can climb it.”

“We can’t leave the bicycles outside, though,” said Dick, and he took a good look at the heavy padlocked gate.  Then he slowly lifted it off its hinges, wheeled in the bicycles, and replaced the gate in position.

Rachel looked at him.

“Do you always do what you want to do?” she said, involuntarily.

“It saves trouble,” he said, “especially as no one can be such a first-class fool as to think a padlock will keep a gate shut.  He would expect it to be opened.”

“But father said no one could come in there now,” explained Regie, who had watched, open-mouthed, the upheaval of the gate.  “Father said it could not be opened any more.  He told mother.”

“Did he, my son?” said Dick, and he kissed every one, beginning with Hester and finishing with the dolls.  Then they all sat down to the tea-party, and partook largely of the delicacies, and after tea Dick solemnly asked the children if they had seen the flying half-penny he had brought back with him from Australia.  The children crowded round him, and the half-penny was produced and handed round.  Each child touched it, and found it real.  Auntie Hester and Auntie Rachel examined it.  Boulou was requested to smell it.  And then it was laid on the grass, and the pocket-handkerchief which had done duty as a table-cloth was spread over it.

The migrations of the half-penny were so extraordinary that even Rachel and Hester professed amazement.  Once it was found in Rachel’s hand, into which another large hand had gently shut it.  But it was never discovered twice in the same place, though all the children rushed religiously to look for it where it was last discovered.

Another time, after a long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie’s back; and amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his stocking at his knee.

“Make it fly down my back too, Uncle Dick,” shrieked Mary.  “Regie, give it to me.”

But Regie danced in a circle round Dick, holding aloft the wonderful half-penny.

“Make it fly down my throat,” he cried, too excited to know what he was doing, and he put the half-penny in his mouth.

“Put it out this instant,” said Dick, without moving.