"Look here, Peter. I can carry you easily standing on my shoulders. If
you get a very long cloak, so as to fall well down on me, no one would
suspect in the dark that there were two of us; we should look like
one tremendously tall man. Well, you know, he goes every evening to
Dunstable's to sing with Miss Dunstable. They say he's making love to
her. We can waylay him in the narrow lane, and make him give up that
new watch he has just bought, that he's so proud of. I heard him say
he had given thirty guineas for it. Of course, we don't want to keep
it, but we would smash it up between a couple of big stones, and send
him all the pieces."

"Capital, Tom; but where should we get the cloak?"

"There is that long wadded silk cloak of aunt's that she uses when she
goes out driving. It always hangs up in the closet in the hall."

"But how are we to get in again, Tom? I expect that he does not come
back till half-past nine or ten. We can slip out easily enough after
we are supposed to have gone to bed; but how are we to get back?"

"The only plan, Peter, is to get in through Rhoda's window. She is
very angry at that brute Jones treating us so badly, and if I take her
into the secret I feel sure she will agree."

Rhoda was appealed to, and although at first she said it was quite,
quite impossible, she finally agreed, although with much fear and
trembling, to assist them. First, the boys were to buy some rope and
make a rope ladder, which Rhoda was to take up to her room; she was to
open the window wide when she went to bed, but to pull the blind down