"We've got to stop the thieves, somehow," Divvy declared, looking around for inspiration.

"Call for help?" Fizzy suggested.

"Raise the alarm," Billy snapped his fingers at his own idea and the twins looked at him a moment. Then they looked at each other and nodded.

Without a word they raced up the pathway the men had ascended and sought the mansion presumably at the end of it. If they had been thieves they would not have approached the front door naturally so this was where the girls headed, the Chancefleet boy following on as best he could. He stopped when confronted by the huge west facade of some rich person's humble abode.

"You could put the whole school in there," he whistled softly.

"Shut up, I'm going to ring the bell for attention," Divvy said and walked hesitantly up the wide front steps to a door so polished and gleaming it emitted its own glow, or seemed to. Her figure looked tiny right next to this great portal beyond which lay mystery. She pressed a button and a whole series of lights went on around the entranceway, blinding everyone a moment. Apart from that nothing happened, except a dog barked from some indeterminate location. Ominously it was the kind of deep, booming sort of bark usually associated with a very large guard dog. Even more ominously the sound was getting louder. Then the door opened and Divvy jumped back, expecting to be torn to pieces in an instant.

The lights from around the entrance and from within the hallway revealed not a huge beast or armed guard, but a rather diminutive butler type, round of head and round of belly, the latter wrapped in dark silk with the exception of a bright red bow tie which marked the location where his body ended and his head began, for he seemed a very soft and smooth individual without a single hard plane or angle about him. Except for a square box he held in one pudgy hand. It was this that emitted the dangerous barking. He shook it and it fell silent.

"Appears won't be needing that," he said, looking briefly from one young and terrified face to another. "How may I ask are you here? Trespassing may result in the real thing," and he held up the barking box pointedly.

"Sorry to disturb," Divvy said, speaking on a level with the butler, doorman person, for he really was quite diminutive, surrounded by a huge space in the open doorway. One could pass either side without touching him so little of a barrier was he to any forced ingress. "We are from Miss Plazenby's Extremely Exclusive Seminary for Girls and-"

A pudgy hand was lifted, interrupting this preliminary introduction and the man tilted his head so he was looking at the timid boy half hidden behind the blonde pigtails of Fizzy Massking. Divvy turned to see what the problem was.

"Oh, he's our servant, more an unpaid slave really. We have him to fetch and carry, after all we are extremely exclusive girls."

"Exclusive of this house at such an hour of night, extremely so," suggested the doorman with a wry twist of the mouth. Briefly Divvy contemplated bundling the unhelpful minion of the owner out of the way, for he was obviously a mere servant himself, but she decided to stick to the hierarchy of command.

"Which is why we've come to raise the alarm. Two men have got in and as we speak here about the niceness of the evening they may be filching all manner of things behind your back."

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"And how, may I enquire, did these two men get beyond a state of the art security system that surrounds this estate with instant kill efficiency?"

"We let them in," came a shrill distant voice that only Billy Buckle could command. Divvy lowered her eyes in blushing shame. This alarm raising business was simply not going well. The servant's own eyes widened and then shrunk suspiciously, for here before him were presumed collaborators in the alleged thievery. He was about to suggest a period of incarceration for the three youngsters while he investigate when a flash of light from an upstairs window followed by the scream of a maid changed matters instantly.

"You stay here," he said, trying to point at all three with just one finger which thus hovered hesitantly left and right. Then he disappeared, closing the huge door with a loud boom, though not as loud as it should have, for while Divvy tried to explain herself she had taken off her scarf and wrung it nervously in one hand all the while holding the trophy in the other, so that when the scream happened she dropped the both of them. The trophy clunked upon the marble step but the scarf drifted on a light evening breeze towards the entrance, alighting upon a gilt and exalted threshold over which only the privileged were deemed worthy to pass. Thus the great door, the last defence against intruders, closed improperly, choked by a thin piece of fabric unheeded by the guardian of the ways as he rushed off intent on his own investigation.

Divvy picked up the Triple Shield and examined it carefully for dents or other damage, while Fizzy ascended the high steps and pushed open the door to retrieve the lost scarf. They looked at each other, then at the growing opening as the heavy barrier continued to swing inward revealing a sumptuous hallway lit with glittering stars and bounded by wide and colourful staircases framed by the thickest, roundest most highly polished pillars they had ever seen.

"Hey, wait for me!" Billy Buckle's thin high voice could be heard from the driveway as the twins crossed the forbidden threshold with a thrilled step and not heeding their abandoned companion's cries pushed the great door closed with a much more satisfying boom of finality.

"Which way twin?" said one.

"Up hill of course for we are on the lowest level," the other instructed and the girls duly raced towards a series of stairways that wound and dodged this way and that as it took them several levels above the hallway, past gilt mirrors and strange grey-green busts of what appeared to them half-finished people, so slight the sculptures seemed. Corridors like magical labyrinths opened out to them as they ran they knew not whither, only so that they found someone to warn of what might be happening.

Finally they pounced upon a maid who stood transfixed with shock halfway along a particularly rich looking passage high up in the mansion.

"What are you children doing here?" she said in a cultured and pleasant voice, tinctured this moment with apprehension. "You are not part of this crisis are you?"

"Certainly not," Divvy said, approaching cautiously for the maid held what looked like a heavy club in one hand.

"We're the solution," Fizzy ambitiously added, having read such a rejoinder in an adventure book, this seeming to her some such similar event.

The maid remained frozen in place next to an archway crowned by carvings that shone in metallic green very prettily, drawing the eyes of the girls from the uniformed figure a moment as they paused.

"Who is it dear?" came a faint female voice from beyond the archway. The twins could see in by this time and the occupant of the room beyond was presented with the odd sight of two round pale faces framed by blonde pigtails and dominated by great blue shining eyes hovering next the door frame. "Oh, how delightful," the lady said. "Show them in Marshay, visitors at last. How delightful."

The twins were duly ushered in and were presented with the sight of a tiny elderly lady nestled within a plump soft maroon bed a hundred times bigger than her, gesturing with a tiny claw for them to come closer.

They had no doubt they were in the presence of the mysterious owner of the huge mansion, an owner who was in the very process of being robbed.