Page:Carroll - Sylvie and Bruno.djvu/325

XX] "But we consider you a very bad Queen's Evidence," Lady Muriel added playfully, as we entered the arbour. "We pronounce you to be an accomplice: and we sentence you to solitary confinement, and to be fed on bread and——butter. Do you take sugar?"

"It is disquieting, certainly," she resumed, when all 'creature-comforts' had been duly supplied, "to find that the house has been entered by a thief——in this out-of-the-way place. If only the flowers had been eatables, one might have suspected a thief of quite another shape——"

"You mean that universal explanation for all mysterious disappearances, 'the cat did it'?" said Arthur.

"Yes," she replied. "What a convenient thing it would be if all thieves had the same shape! It's so confusing to have some of them quadrupeds and others bipeds!"

"It has occurred to me," said Arthur, "as a curious problem in Teleology——the Science of Final Causes," he added, in answer to an enquiring look from Lady Muriel.

"And a Final Cause is——?"