it's robbers. I expect it's a stray cat got in when the coals came this morning, and she's been hiding in the cellar, and now she's moving about. Let's go down and see."
The girls wouldn't, of course; but I could see that they breathed more freely too. But Dicky said, "All right; I will if you will."
H. O. said, "Do you think it's really a cat?" So we said he had better stay with the girls. And of course after that we had to let him and Alice both come. Dora said if we took Noël down with his cold, she would scream "Fire!" and "Murder!" and she didn't mind if the whole street heard.
So Noël agreed to be getting his clothes on, and the rest of us said we would go down and look for the cat.
Now Oswald said that about the cat, and it made it easier to go down, but in his inside he did not feel at all sure that it might not be robbers after all. Of course, we had often talked about robbers before, but it is very different when you sit in a room and listen and listen and listen; and Oswald felt somehow that it would be easier to go down and see what it was, than to wait, and listen, and wait, and wait, and listen, and wait, and then perhaps to hear It, whatever it was, come
