Some one would have time to see it and snatch it and hold to it."
"Isn't there any way?" Dickie asked, insisting to himself that he wasn't sleepy.
"There's the way of everything—the earth," she said; "bury it, and lie down on the spot where it's buried, and then, when you get back into the other dream, the kind, thick earth will have hid your secret, and you can dig it up again. It will be there . . . unless other hands have dug there in the three hundred years. You must take your chance of that."
"Will you help me?" Dickie asked. "I shall need to dig it very deep if I am to cheat three hundred years. And suppose," he added, struck by a sudden and unpleasing thought, "there's a house built on the place. I should be mixed up with the house. Two things can't be in the same place at the same time. My tutor told me that. And the house would be so much stronger than me—it would get the best of it, and where should I be then?"
"I'll ask where thou'd be," was the very surprising answer. "I'll ask some one who knows. But it'll take time—put thy money in the great press, and I'll keep the key. And next Friday as ever is, come your little cousins."
They came. It was more difficult with them than it was with the grown-ups to conceal the fact that he had not always been the Dickie he was now; but it was not so difficult as you might suppose. It was no harder than not talking about the dreams you had last night.
