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“She isn’t very scared, I guess,” said Dick.

“Well, she was, and she was up on a chair,” declared Dorothy. “Come on, Dick!”

Together they hurried into the kitchen. Mary was no longer standing on a chair. Instead she was sitting down in one, laughing as hard as she could laugh.

Carlo was out in the middle of the floor, tossing up into the air something brown and fuzzy.

“Where’s the mouse?” cried Dick. “I want to see if I can shoot it with my pop gun.”

“Mouse? There isn’t any mouse, Dick!” laughed Mary.

“Dorothy said there was,” he declared.

“Yes, and I thought there was, too,” went on the cook. “But it was only a piece of fur that Carlo had. It’s one of the tails off Martha’s fur neck-piece. She dropped it, and Carlo found it. I guess he thought it was a mouse, and I did, too, at first.”

“Bow wow! Gurr-r-r-r-r!” growled the poodle dog, as he shook and tossed the fuzzy thing. And as it fell near Dick the boy looked and saw that, indeed, it was only a piece of fur, as Mary had said.

“I thought it was a mouse,” said Dorothy. “And I guess Carlo did, too.”

“If it had been I could have made it run back to its hole when I banged my pop gun at it!” declared Dick. “Now I guess I’ll play I’m a soldier captain on a horse. I’m going to ride my Rocking Horse,” he went on, as he hurried back to the playroom.

“I’ll take my Sawdust Doll,” said Dorothy, “and we’ll have some fun.”

All day long the children played, and after supper, when it was time for them to go to bed, Dick pulled his Rocking Horse out into the hall.

“Are you going to leave him there all night?” asked his mother.

“Yes,” he answered. “I want to put my railroad track down in the playroom in the morning, and there isn’t room if I have the Rocking Horse in there too. I’ll make believe the hall is his stable.”

“Then I’ll not leave my Sawdust Doll out there, for she cannot sleep in a stable,” said Dorothy.

Dick’s mother intended to move the White Rocking Horse out of the way, for it took up too much room in the hall, but she forgot about it when callers came that evening, and, when the family went to bed, the Horse was still out near the head of the stairs that led down to the first floor.

The house became quiet, only a dim light gleaming in the upper hall, and the White Rocking Horse drew a long breath.

“Now I can be myself,” he thought. “I can come to life. I wish I could see the Sawdust Doll and talk to her,” he said half aloud.

“Well, here I am,” and the Sawdust Doll came out of Dorothy’s room. “The little girl is asleep,” went on the Sawdust Doll, “so I came out to talk to you. I want to hear all that happened in the toy hospital. I haven’t had a chance to ask you since you got back.”

“And I haven’t had a chance to talk to you,” went on the White Rocking Horse. “It is nice and quiet, now, and we can talk as long as we like; or at least until morning comes.”

“It must be a funny place–that hospital,” said the Sawdust Doll.

“It is,” answered the Rocking Horse. “But I would much rather be here with you.”

“Thank you,” replied the Sawdust Doll.

Now, while the toys were thus talking together in the middle of the night, two bad men were prowling around the house where Dick and Dorothy and their father and mother lived. The two bad men were called burglars, and they wanted to get in, and take the silver knives, forks, and other things that were in the dining room, and perhaps some rings from the dresser in the room of Dorothy’s mother.

And as the White Rocking Horse and the Sawdust Doll were talking together at the head of the stairs the two bad men made their way into the house by unlocking the front door with a false key one of them carried.