See?"
He turned to leave her, but stopped at her natural question:
"What hotel did you say you were going to take them to?"
"Oh, Jimminy!" the harassed Gerald caught at his hair with both
hands. "There! you see, Mabel, you're a help already." he had, even
at that moment, some tact left. "I clean forgot! I meant to ask you
isn't there any lodge or anything in the Castle grounds where I
could put them for the night? The charm will break, you know,
some time, like being invisible did, and they'll just be a pack of
coats and things that we can easily carry home any day. Is there a
lodge or anything?"
"There's a secret passage," Mabel began but at the moment the
yard-door opened and an Ugly-Wugly put out its head and looked
anxiously down the street.
"Righto!" Gerald ran to meet it. It was all Mabel could do not to
run in an opposite direction with an opposite motive. It was all she
could do, but she did it, and was proud of herself as long as ever
she remembered that night.
And now, with all the silent precaution necessitated by the near
presence of an extremely insane uncle, the Ugly-Wuglies, a grisly
band, trooped out of the yard door.
"Walk on your toes, dear," the bonneted Ugly-Wugly whispered to
the one with a wreath; and even at that thrilling crisis Gerald
wondered how she could, since the toes of one foot were but the
end of a golf club and of the other the end of a hockey-stick.
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