He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked up and down the path a few times.  “Fizz’ll get us hanged yet,” he muttered, looking darkly at the door in the wall through which she had disappeared.  He pushed his hat to the back of hiss head and stared gloomily at his boots, wondering what would be the consequences of this new mischief.  There was a light footfall beside him.

“Come on,” said Judy, pulling his sleeve; “it’s done now, come on, let’s go and have our fun; have you got the money safe?”

It was two o’clock as they passed out of the gate and turned their faces up, the hill to the tram stopping-place.  And it was half-past four when they jumped out of a town-bound tram and entered the gates again to pick up their charge.

Such an afternoon as they had had!  Once inside the Aquarium, even Pip had put his conscience qualms on one side, and bent all his energies to enjoying himself thoroughly.  And Judy was like a little mad thing.  She spent a shilling of her money on the switchback railway, pronouncing the swift, bewildering motion “heavenly.”  The first journey made Pip feel sick, so he eschewed a repetition of it, and watched Judy go off from time to time, waving gaily from the perilous little car, almost with his heart in his mouth.  Then they hired a pair of roller skates each, and bruised themselves black and blue with heavy falls on the asphalt.  After that they had a ride on the merry-go-round, but Judy found it tame after the switchback, and refused to squander a second threepence upon it, contenting herself with watching Pip fly round, and madly running by his side, to keep up as long as she could.  They finished the afternoon with a prolonged inspection of the fish-tanks, a light repast of jam tarts of questionable freshness, and twopennyworth of peanuts.  And, as I said, it was half-past four as they hastened up the path again to the top gate of the Barracks.

“I hope he’s been good,” Judy said, as she turned the handle.  “Yes, you come, too, Pip”—­for that young gentleman hung back one agonized second.  “Twenty kicks or blows divided by two only make ten, you see.”

They went up the long stone veranda and stopped at one door.

There was a little knot of young officers laughing and talking close by.

“Take my word, ’twas as good as a play to see Wooly grabbing his youngster, and stuffing it into a cab, and getting in himself, all with a look of ponderous injured dignity,” one said, and laughed at the recollection.

Another blew away a cloud of cigar smoke.  “It was a jolly little beggar,” he said.  “It doubled its fists and landed His High Mightiness one in the eye; and then its shoe dropped off, and we all rushed to pick it up, and it was muddy and generally dilapidated, and old Wooly went red slowly up to his ear-tips as he tried to put it on.”

A little figure stepped into the middle of the group—­a little figure with an impossibly short and shabby ulster, thin black-stockinged legs, and a big hat crushed over a tangle of curls.