Page:Oswald Bastable and Others - Nesbit.djvu/257

Rh get it back to Miss Patty, so that she won't lose the things she sold it for, and won't know about the ring having been in it.' 'Consider it done, madam,' said the Slave of the Lamp, stroking his respectable butlerial whisker. 'Now, if you're ready, your footman shall see you home.'

'Good-bye, oh, good-bye,' said the little girls, kissing each other very much.

Then Fina shut her eyes, and there she was in the wood in Sussex—alone.

'Now, have I dreamed it all?' she said, and went slowly home to tea.

The first thing she saw on the tea-table was the pagoda! And the next was a brown-faced sailor eating hot buttered toast in the Windsor armchair.

'Well may you look!' said Miss Patty; 'this is my brother Bob, newly arrived from foreign parts. And he met that pedlar and bought the pagoda off him for two pounds and a highly-coloured cockatoo he was bringing home. And these ten sovereigns the wicked old man gave me are bad ones. But the dresses and the cloth are good. It's a wonderful world!'

Fina thought so too.

Now, the oddest thing about all this is that six