"I couldn't wait any longer," she explained, "when you didn't come. And I got a lift. Has anything more happened? The burglars had gone when Bates got to the strong-room."
"You don't mean to say all that wheeze is _real_?" Jimmy asked.
"Of course it's real," said Kathleen. "Go on, Jerry. He's just got to where he threw the stone into your bread-and-butter pudding, Mabel. Go on."
Mabel climbed on to the wall. "You've got visible again quicker than I did," she said.
"Our story must be told in as few words as possible, owing to the fish-frying taking place at twelve, and it's past the half-hour now. Having left his missive to do its warning work, Gerald de Sherlock Holmes sped back, wrapped in invisibility, to the spot where by the light of their dark-lanterns the burglars were still--still burgling with the utmost punctuality and despatch. I didn't see any sense in running into danger, so I just waited outside the passage where the steps are--you know?"
"Presently they came out, very cautiously, of course, and looked about them. They didn't see me--so deeming themselves unobserved they passed in silent Indian file along the passage--one of the sacks of silver grazed my front part--and out into the night."
"Through the little looking-glass room where you looked at yourself when you were invisible. The hero followed swiftly on his invisible tennis-shoes. The three miscreants instantly sought the shelter of the groves and passed stealthily among the rhododendrons and across the park, and"--his voice dropped and he looked straight before him at the pinky convolvulus netting a heap of stones beyond the white dust of the road--"the stone things that come alive, they kept looking out from between bushes and under trees--and _I_ saw them all right, but they didn't see me. They saw the burglars though, right enough; but the burglars couldn't see them. Rum, wasn't it?"
"The stone things?" Mabel had to have them explained to her.
"_I_ never saw them come alive," she said, "and I've been in the gardens in the evening as often as often."
"I know, I know," Mabel hastened to put herself right with him: "what I mean to say is I shouldn't wonder if they're only visible when you're _in_visible--the liveness of them, I mean, not the stoniness."