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Wet Magic the gypsies are awake? They do sit up to study astronomy to tell fortunes with, don't they? Suppose this is their astronomy night? I vote we leave the barrow here and go and reconnoiter."

They did. Their sandshoes made no noise on the dewy grass, and treading very carefully, on tiptoe, they came to the tent. Francis nearly tumbled over a guy rope; he just saw it in time to avoid it.

"If I'd been Bernard I should have come a beastly noisy over that," he told himself. They crept around the tent till they came to the little square bulge that marked the place where the tank was and the seaweed and the Mermaid.

"They die in captivity, they die in captivity, they die in captivity," Mavis kept repeating to herself, trying to keep up her courage by reminding herself of the desperately urgent nature of the adventure. "It's a matter of life and death," she told herself—"life and death."

And now they picked their way between the pegs and guy ropes and came quite close to the canvas. Doubts of the strength and silence of the knife possessed the trembling soul of Francis. Mavis's heart was beating so thickly that, as she said afterward, she could hardly hear herself think. She scratched gently on the canvas, while Francis felt for the knife with the three blades and the corkscrew. An answering signal from the imprisoned Mermaid would, she felt, give her fresh confidence. There was no answering scratch. Instead, a dark line appeared to run up the canvas—it was an opening made by the two hands of the Mermaid which held back the two halves of the tent side, cut neatly from top to bottom. Her white face peered out.

"Where is the chariot?" she asked in the softest of whispers, but not too soft to carry to the children the feeling that she was, if possible, crosser than ever. 48