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 Phyllis, flushing red. "I think it was very nice of him to give it me at all—let alone cups and plates," she added.

"So do I," said the old gentleman, and he drank some of the tea and tasted the bread and butter.

And then it was time for the next train, and he got into it with many good-bys and kind last words.

"Well," said Peter, when they were left on the platform, and the tail-lights of the train disappeared round the corner, "it's my belief that we've lighted a candle to-day,—like Latimer, you know, when he was being burned,—and there'll be fireworks for our Russian before long."

And so there was.

It wasn't ten days after the interview in the waiting room that the three children were sitting on the top of the biggest rock in the field below their house watching the 5.15 steam away from the station along the bottom of the valley. They saw too, the few people who had got out at the station straggling up the road towards the village—and they saw one person leave the road and open the gate that led across the fields to Three Chimneys and to nowhere else.