"And you never told us how you got them!" said Lady Muriel.
"Some day," I stammered, "I may be free to tell you. Just now, would
you excuse me?"
The Earl looked disappointed, but kindly said "Very well, we will ask
no questions."
[Image...Five o'clock tea]
"But we consider you a very bad Queen's Evidence," Lady Muriel
added playfully, as we entered the arbour. "We pronounce you to be an
accomplice: and we sentence you to solitary confinement, and to be fed
on bread and butter. Do you take sugar?"
"It is disquieting, certainly," she resumed, when all 'creature-comforts'
had been duly supplied, "to find that the house has been entered by a
thief in this out-of-the-way place. If only the flowers had been eatables,
one might have suspected a thief of quite another shape--"
"You mean that universal explanation for all mysterious disappearances,
'the cat did it'?" said Arthur.
"Yes," she replied. "What a convenient thing it would be if all
thieves had the same shape! It's so confusing to have some of them
quadrupeds and others bipeds!"
"It has occurred to me," said Arthur, "as a curious problem in Teleology--
the Science of Final Causes," he added, in answer to an enquiring look
from Lady Muriel.
"And a Final Cause is--?"
"Well, suppose we say--the last of a series of connected events--each
of the series being the cause of the next--for whose sake the first
event takes place."
"But the last event is practically an effect of the first, isn't it?
And yet you call it a cause of it!"
Arthur pondered a moment.
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