When all the leaves were plucked from the window’s square, and only the brown ivy boughs left, she turned back to the room. The furniture was all powdered heavily with dust, and what had made the floor so soft to walk upon was the thick carpet of dust that lay there. There was the table on which the Chevalier St. George—no, Sir Edward Talbot—had set the tray. There were the chairs, and there, sure enough, was the corner cupboard in which he had put the jewels. Elfrida got its door open with I don’t know what of mingled hopes and fears. It had three shelves, but the jewels were on none of them. In fact there was nothing on any of them. But on the inside of the door her hand, as she held it open, felt something rough. And when she looked it was a name carved, and when she swung the door well back so that the light fell full on it she saw that the name was “E. Talbot.” So then she knew that all she had seen in that room before must have really happened two hundred years before, and was not just a piece of magic Mouldiwarpiness.

She climbed up on the chair again and looked out through the little window. She could see nothing of the Castle walls—only the distant shoulder of the downs and the path that cut across it towards the station. She would have liked to see a red figure or a violet one coming along that path. But there was no figure on it at all.

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry—one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

Elfrida began with “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!” but there were parts of that which she liked best when there were other people about—so she stopped it, and began “Horatius and the Bridge.” This lasts a long time. Then came the Favourite Cat drowned in a tub of Gold-fish—and in the middle of that, quite suddenly, and I don’t know why, she thought of the Mouldiwarp.

“We didn’t quite quarrel,” she told herself. “At least not really, truly quarrelling. I might try anyhow.”

So she set to work to make a piece of poetry to call up the Mouldiwarp with.

This was how, after a long time, the first piece came out—

But when she said it aloud nothing happened. “I wonder,” said Elfrida, “whether it’s because we quarrelled, or because it just says he let me out and doesn’t ask him to, or because I had to say Elfrida, to make it sound right, or because it’s such dreadful nonsense. I’ll try again.”

She tried again. This time she got—

She said it aloud, and when she came to the last words there was the white Mouldiwarp sitting on the floor at her feet and looking up at her with eyes that blinked.

“You are good to come,” Elfrida said.

“Well, what do you want now?” said the Mole.

“I—I ought to tell you that I oughtn’t to ask you to do anything, but I didn’t think you’d come if it really counted as a quarrel. It was only a little one, and we were both sorry quite directly.”

“You have a straightforward nature,” said the Mouldiwarp. “Well, well, I must say you’ve got yourself into a nice hole!”

“It would be a very nice hole,” said Elfrida eagerly, “if only the panel were open. I wouldn’t mind how long I stayed here then. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the Mole. “Well, if you hadn’t quarrelled I could get you into another time—some time when the panel was open—and you could just walk out. You shouldn’t quarrel. It makes everything different. It puts dust into the works. It stops the wheels of the clock.”

“The clock!” said Elfrida slowly. “Couldn’t that work backwards?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the Mole.

“I don’t know that I quite know myself,” Elfrida explained; “but the daisy-clock. You sit on the second hand and there isn’t any time—and yet there’s lots where you’re not sitting. If I could sit on the daisy-clock the time wouldn’t be anything before some one comes to let me out. But I can’t get to the daisy-clock, even if you’d make it for me. So that’s no good.”

“You are a very clever little girl,” said the Mouldiwarp, “and all the clocks in the world aren’t made of daisies. Move the tables and chairs back against the wall; we’ll see what we can do for you.”

While Elfrida was carrying out this order—the white Mole stood on its hind feet and called out softly in a language she did not understand. Others understood it though, it seemed, for a white pigeon fluttered in through the window, and then another and another, till the room seemed full of circling wings and gentle cooings, and a shower of soft, white feathers fell like snow.

Then the Mole was silent, and one by one the white pigeons sailed back through the window into the blue and gold world of out-of-doors.

“Get up on a chair and keep out of the way,” said the Mouldiwarp. And Elfrida did.

And then a soft wind blew through the little room—a wind like the wind that breathes softly in walled gardens and shakes down the rose-leaves on sparkling summer mornings. And the white feathers on the floor were stirred by the sweet wind, and drifted into little heaps and lines and curves till they made on the dusty floor the circle of a clock-face, with all its figures and its long hand and its short hand and its second hand. And the white Mole stood in the middle.

“All white things obey me,” it said. “Come, sit down on the minute hand, and you’ll be there in no time.”

“Where?” asked Elfrida, getting off the chair.

“Why, at the time when they open the panel. Let me get out of the clock first. And give me the key of the parlour door. It’ll save time in the end.”

So Elfrida sat down on the minute hand, and instantly it began to move round—faster than you can possibly imagine. And it was very soft to sit on—like a cloud would be if the laws of nature ever permitted you to sit on clouds. And it spun round so that it seemed no time at all before she found herself sitting on the floor and heard voices, and knew that the secret panel was open.

“I see,” she said wisely, “it does work backwards, doesn’t it?”

But there was no one to answer her, for the Mouldiwarp was gone. And the white pigeons’ feathers were in heaps on the floor. She saw them, as she stood up. And there wasn’t any clock-face any more.

· · · · ·

Edred soon got tired of “Red Cotton Nightcap Country,” which really is not half such good fun as it sounds, even for grown-ups, and he tried several other books. But reading did not seem amusing, somehow. And the house was so much too quiet, and the clock outside ticked so much too loud—and Elfrida was shut up, and there were bars to the windows, and the door was locked. He walked about, and sat in each of the chairs in turn, but no one of them was comfortable. And his thoughts were not comfortable either. Suppose no one ever came to let them out! Supposing the years rolled on and found him still a prisoner, when he was a white-haired old man, like people in the Bastille, or in Iron Masks? His eyes filled with tears at the thought. Fortunately it did not occur to him that unless some one came pretty soon he would be unlikely to live to a great age, since people cannot live long without eating. If he had thought of this he would have been even more unhappy than he was—and he was quite unhappy enough. Then he began to wonder if “anything had happened” to Elfrida. She was dreadfully quiet inside there behind the panel. He wished he had not quarrelled with her. Everything was very miserable. He went to the window and looked out, as Elfrida had done, to see if he could see a red dress or a violet dress coming over the downs. But there was nothing. And the time got longer and longer, drawing itself out like a putty snake, when you rub it between your warm hands—and at last, what with misery, and having cried a good deal, and its being long past tea-time, he fell asleep on the window-seat.

He was roused by a hand on his shoulder and a voice calling his name.

Next moment he was in the arms of Aunt Edith, or as much in her arms as he could be with the window-bars between them.

When he had told her where Elfrida was, and where the room-key was, which took some time, he began to cry again—for he did not quite see, even now, how he was to be got out.

“Now don’t be a dear silly,” said Aunt Edith. “If we can’t get you out any other way I’ll run and fetch a locksmith. But look what I found right in the middle of the path as I came up from the station.”

It was a key. And tied to it was an ivory label, and on the label were written the words, “Parlour door, Arden.”

“You might try it,” she said.

He did try it. And it fitted. And he unlocked the parlour door and then the front door, so that Aunt Edith could come in.

And together they got the kitchen steps and found the secret spring and opened the panel, and got out the dusty Elfrida. And then Aunt Edith lighted the kitchen fire and boiled the kettle; they had tea, which every one wanted very badly indeed. And Aunt Edith had brought little cakes for tea with pink icing on them, very soft inside with apricot jam. And she had come to stay over Sunday.

She was as much excited as the children over the secret panel, and after tea (when Edred had fetched Emily back from the wild-goose chase for a parcel at the station, on which she was still engaged), the aunt and the niece and the nephew explored the secret stair and the secret chamber thoroughly.

“What a wonderful lot of pigeons’ feathers!” said Aunt Edith; “they must have been piling up here for years and years.”

“It was lucky, you finding that key,” said Edred. “I wonder who dropped it. Where’s the other one, Elf?”

“I don’t know,” said Elfrida truthfully, “it isn’t in my pocket now.”

And though Edred and Aunt Edith searched every corner of the secret hiding-place they never found that key.

Elfrida alone knows that she gave it to the Mouldiwarp. And as Mrs. Honeysett declared that there had never been a parlour key with a label on it in her time it certainly does seem as though the Mole must have put the key he got from Elfrida on the path for Aunt Edith to find, after carefully labelling it to prevent mistakes. How the Mole got the label is another question, but I really think that finding a label for a key is quite a simple thing to do—I have done it myself. Whereas making a clock-face of white pigeon feathers is very difficult indeed—and a thing that I have never been able to do. And as for making that clock-face the means of persuading time to go fast or slow, just as one wishes—well, I don’t suppose even you could do that.

Elfrida found it rather a relief to go back to the ordinary world, where magic moles did not upset the clock—a world made pleasant by nice aunts and the old delightful games that delight ordinary people. Games such as “Hunt the thimble,” “What is my thought like,” and “Proverbs.” The three had a delightful weekend, and Aunt Edith told them all about the lodgers and the seaside house, which already seemed very long ago and far away. On Sunday evening, as they walked home from Arden Church, where they had tried to attend to the service, and not to look too much at the tombs and monuments of dead-and-gone Ardens that lined the chancel, the three sat down on Arden Knoll, and Aunt Edith explained things a little to them. She told them much more than they could understand about wills, and trustees, and incomes, but they were honoured by her confidence, and pleased by the fact that she seemed to think they could understand such grown-up kind of things. And the thing that remained on their minds after the talk, like a ship cast up by a high tide, was this: that Arden Castle was theirs, and that there was very little money to “keep it up” with. So that every one must be very careful, and no one must be at all extravagant. And Aunt Edith was going back to the world of lawyers, and wills, and trustees, early on Monday morning, and they must be very good children, and not bother Mrs. Honeysett, and never, never lock themselves in and hide the key in safe places.

All this remained, as the lasting result of the pleasant talk on the downs in the softly lessening light.

And another thing remained, which Edred put into words as the two children walked back from the station, where they had seen Aunt Edith into the train and waved their goodbyes to her.

“It is very important indeed,” he said, “for us to find the treasure. Then we could ‘keep up’ the Castle without any bother. We must have it built up again first, of course, and then we’ll keep it up. And we won’t have any old clocks and not keeping together, this time. We’ll both of us go and find the attic the minute our quarrel’s three days old, and we’ll ask the Mouldiwarp to send us to a time when we can really see the treasure with our own eyes. I do think that’s a good idea, don’t you?” he asked, with modest pride.

“Very,” Elfrida said. “And I say, Edred, I don’t mean to quarrel any more if I can help it. It is such waste of time,” she added in her best grown-up manner, “and it does delay everything so. Delays are dangerous. It says so in the ‘proverb’ game. Suppose there really was a chance of getting the treasure and we had to wait three days because of quarrelling. But I’ll tell you one thing I found out: you can get the Mole to come and help you, even if you have quarrelled a little. Because I did.” And she told him how.

“But, I expect,” she added. “It would only come if I were in the most awful trouble and all human aid despaired of.”

“Well, we’re not that now,” said Edred, knocking the head off a poppy with his stick, “and I’m jolly glad we’re not.”

“I wonder,” said Elfrida, “who lives in that cottage where the witch was. I know exactly where it is. I expect it’s been pulled down, though. Let’s go round that way. It’ll be something to do.”

So they went round that way, and the way was quite easy to find. But when they got to the place where the tumbledown cottage had been in Boney’s time, there was only a little slate-roofed house with a blue bill pasted up on its yellow-brick face saying that somebody’s A1 ginger-beer and up-to-date minerals were sold there. The house was dull to look at, and they did not happen to have any spare money for ginger-beer, so they turned round to go home and suddenly found themselves face to face with a woman. She wore a red-and-black plaid blouse and a bought ready-made black skirt, and on her head was a man’s peaked cap such as women in the country wear now instead of the pretty sun bonnets that they used to wear when I was a little girl.

“So they’ve pulled the old cottage down,” she said. “This new house’ll be fine and dry inside, I lay. The rain comes in through the roof of the old one so’s you might a’most as well be laying in the open medder.”

The children listened politely, and both were wondering where they had seen this woman before, for her face was strangely familiar to them, and yet they didn’t seem really to know her either.

“Most of the cottages ’bout here is just as bad as they always was,” she went on. “When Arden has the handling of the treasure he’ll see to it that poor folks lie warm and dry, won’t he now?”

And then all in a minute the children both knew, and she knew that they knew.

“Why,” said Edred, “you’re the——”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m the witch come from old ancient times. If you can go back I can go forth, because then and now’s the same if I know how to make a clock.”

“Can you make clocks?” said Elfrida. “I thought it was only——”

“So it be,” said the witch. “I can’t make ’em, but I know them as can. And I’ve come ’ere to find you, ’cause you brought me the tea and sugar. I’ve got the wise eye, I have. I can see back and forth. I looked forrard and I saw ye, and I looked back and I saw what you’re seeking, and I know where the treasure is and——”

“But where did you get those clothes?” Edred asked; and it was a question he was afterwards to have reason to regret.

“Oh, clothes is easy come by,” said the witch. “If it was only clothes I could be a crowned queen this very minute.”

The children had a fleeting impression of seeing against the criss-cross fence of the potato patch a lady in crimson and ermine with a gold crown. They blinked, startled, and saw that there was no crimson and gold, only the dull clothes of the witch against the background of potato patch.

“And how did you get here?” Edred asked.

“That speckled hen of mine’s a-settin’ on the clock-face now,” she said. “I quieted her with a chalk-line drawn from her beak’s end straight out into the world of wonders. If she rouses up, then I’m back there, and I can’t never come back here, my dears, nor more than once, I can’t. So let’s make haste down to the Castle, and I’ll show you where my great granny see them put the treasure when she was a little gell.”

The three hurried down the steep-banked lane.

“Many’s the time,” the witch went on, “my granny pointed it out to me. It’s just alongside where——”

And then the witch was not there any more. Edred and Elfrida were alone in the lane. The speckled hen must have recovered from her “quieting,” and got off the clock.

“She’s gone right enough,” said Edred, “and now we’ll never know. And just when she was going to tell us where it was. I do think it’s too jolly stupid for anything.”

“It’s you that’s too jolly stupid for anything,” said Elfrida hotly. “What did you want to go asking her about her silly clothes for? It was that did it. She’d have told us where it was before now if you hadn’t taken her time up with clothes. As if clothes mattered! I do wish to goodness you’d sometimes try to behave as if you’d got some sense.”

“Go it!” said Edred bitterly. “As if everything wasn’t tiresome enough. Now there’s another three days to wait, because of your nagging. Oh, it’s just exactly like a girl, so it is!”

“I’m—I’m sorry,” said Elfrida, awestricken. “Let’s do something good to make up. I’ll give you that note-book of mine with the lead-pointed mother-of-pearl pencil, and we’ll go round to all the cottages and find out which are leaky, so as to be ready to patch them up when we’ve got the treasure.”

“I don’t want to be good,” said Edred bitterly. “I haven’t quarrelled and put everything back, but I’m going to now,” he said, with determination. “I don’t see why everything should be smashed up and me not said any of the things I want to say.”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Elfrida; “it’s bad enough to quarrel when you don’t want to, but to set out to quarrel! Don’t!”

Edred didn’t. He kicked the dust up with his boots, and the two went back to the Castle in gloomy silence.

At the gate Edred paused. “I’ll make it up now if you like,” he said. “I’ve only just thought of it—but perhaps it’s three days from the end of the quarrel.”

“I see,” said Elfrida; “so the longer we keep it up——”

“Yes,” said Edred; “so let’s call it Pax and not waste any more time.”

CHAPTER VIII
GUY FAWKES

Three days, because there had been a quarrel. But days pass quickly when the sun shines, and it is holiday-time, and you have a big ruined castle to explore and examine—a castle that is your own, or your brother’s.

“After all,” said Elfrida sensibly, “we might quite likely find the treasure ourselves, without any magic Mouldiwarpiness at all. We’ll look thoroughly. We won’t leave a stone unturned.”

“We shall have to leave a good many stones unturned,” said Edred, looking at the great grey mass of the keep that towered tall and frowning above them.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Elfrida. “Come on!” and they went.

They climbed the steep, worn stairs that wound round and round in the darkness—stairs littered with dead leaves and mould and dropped feathers, and the dry, deserted nests of owls and jackdaws; stairs that ended suddenly in daylight and a steep last step, and the top of a broad ivy-grown wall from which you could look down, down, down; past the holes in the walls where the big beams used to be, past the old fireplaces still black with the smoke of fires long since burnt out, past the doors and windows of rooms whose floors fell away long ago; down, down, to where ferns and grass and brambles grew green at the very bottom of the tower.

Then there were arched doors that led to colonnades with strong little pillars and narrow windows, wonderful little unexpected chambers and corners—the best place in the whole wide world for serious and energetic hide-and-seek.

“How glorious,” said Elfrida, as they rested, scarlet and panting, after a thrilling game of “I spy,”—“if all these broken bits were mended, so that you couldn’t see where the new bits were stuck on! And if it could all be exactly like it was when it was brand-new.”

“There wasn’t the house when it was brand-new—the house like it is now, I mean,” said Edred. “I don’t suppose there was any attic with chests in when the castle was new.”

“There couldn’t be, not with all the chests,” said Elfrida; “of course not, because some of the clothes in the chest weren’t made till long after the castle was built. I believe grown-ups can tell what a broken thing was like when it was new. I know they can with bones—mastodons and things. And they made out what Hercules was like out of one foot of him that they found, I believe,” she added hazily.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Edred, “if we could get back to where the castle was all perfect like a model and draw pictures of every part. Then when we found the treasure we should know exactly what to build it up like, shouldn’t we?”

“Yes,” said Elfrida very gently. “We certainly should. But then we should have to know how to draw first, shouldn’t we?”

“Of course we should,” Edred agreed, “but that wouldn’t take long if we really tried. I never do try at school. I don’t like it. But it’s jolly easy. I know that. Burslem mi. always takes the drawing prize, and you know what a duffer he is. We might begin to learn now, don’t you think?”

Elfrida sat down on a fallen stone in the middle of the castle yard, and looked at the intricate wonderful arches and pillars, the crenulated battlements of the towers, the splendid stoutness of the walls, and she sighed.

“Yes,” she said, “let’s begin now——”

“And you’ll have to lend me one of your pencils,” said he, “because I broke mine all to bits trying to get the parlour door open the day you’d got the key in your pocket. Quite a long one it was. You’ll have to lend me a long one, Elf. I can’t draw with those little endy-bits that get inside your hand and prick you with the other end.”

“I don’t mind,” said she, “so long as you don’t put it in your mouth.”

So they got large sheets of writing-paper, and brown calf-bound books for the paper to lie flat on, and they started to draw Arden Castle. And as Elfrida tried to draw everything she knew was there, as well as everything she could see, her drawing soon became almost entirely covered with black-lead.

They had no indiarubber, and if you drew anything wrong it had to stay drawn. When you first begin to draw, you draw a good many things wrong, don’t you? I assure you that nobody would have known that the black and grey muddle on Elfrida’s paper was meant to be a picture of a castle. Edred’s was much more easily recognised, even before he printed “Arden Castle” under it in large, uneven letters. He never once raised his eyes from his paper, and just drew what he thought the front of the castle looked like from the outside. Also he sucked his pencil earnestly—Elfrida’s pencil, I mean—and this made the lines of his drawing very black.

“There!” he said at last, “it’s ever so much liker than yours.”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but there’s more in mine.”

“It doesn’t matter how much there is in a picture if you can’t tell what it’s meant for,” said Edred, with some truth. “Now, in mine you can see the towers, and the big gate, and the windows, and the twiddly in-and-outness on top.”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but . . . well, let’s do something else. I don’t believe we should either of us learn to draw well enough to rebuild Arden by; not before we’ve found the treasure, I mean. Perhaps we might meet a real artist, like the one we saw drawing the castle yesterday—in the past I mean—and get him to draw it for us, and bring the picture back with us, and——”

“Oh,” cried Edred, jumping up and dropping his masterpiece, and the calf-bound volume and the pencil. “I know. The Brownie!”

“The Brownie?”

“Yes—take it with us. Then we could photograph the castle all perfect.”

“But we can’t take it with us.”

“Can’t we?” said Edred; “that’s all you know. Now I’ll tell you something. That first time—a bit of plaster was in my shoe when we changed, and it was in my shoe when we got there, and I took it out when we were learning about ‘dog’s delight.’ And I flipped it out of the window. And when we got back, and I’d changed and everything, there was that bit of plaster in my own shoe. If we can take plaster we can take photographs—cameras, I mean.” This close and intelligent reasoning commanded Elfrida’s respect, and she wished she had thought of it herself. But then she had not had any plaster in her shoe. So she said—

“You’re getting quite clever, aren’t you?”

“Aha,” said Edred, “you’d like to have thought of that yourself, wouldn’t you? I can be clever sometimes, same as you can.”

It is very annoying to have our thoughts read. Elfrida said swiftly, “Not often you can’t,” and then stopped short. For a moment the children stood looking at each other with a very peculiar expression. Then a sigh of relief broke from each.

“Fielded!” said Edred.

“Just in time!” said Elfrida. “It wasn’t a quarrel; nobody could say it was a quarrel. Come on, let’s go and look at the cottages, like the witch told us to.”

They went. They made a tour of inspection that day and the next and the next. And they saw a great many things that a grown-up inspector would never have seen. Poor people are very friendly and kind to you when you are a child. They will let you come into their houses and talk to you and show you things in a way that they would never condescend to do with your grown-up relations. This is, of course, if you are a really nice child, and treat them in a respectful and friendly way. Edred and Elfrida very soon knew more about the insides of the cottages round Arden than any grown-up could have learned in a year. They knew what wages the master of the house got, what there was for dinner, and what, oftener, there wasn’t, how many children were still living, and how many had failed to live. They knew exactly where the rain came through the rotten thatch in bad weather, and where the boards didn’t fit and so let the draughts in, and how some of the doors wouldn’t shut, some wouldn’t open, and how the bedroom windows were, as often as not, not made to open at all.

And when they weren’t visiting the cottages or exploring the castle they found a joyous way of passing the time in the reading aloud of the history of Arden. They took it in turns to read aloud. Elfrida looked carefully for some mention of Sir Edward Talbot and his pretending to be the Chevalier St. George. There was none, but a Sir Edward Talbot had been accused, with the Lord Arden of the time, of plotting against His Most Christian Majesty King James I.

“I wonder if he was like my Edward Talbot?” said Elfrida. “I would like to see him again. I wish I’d told him about us having been born so many years after he died. But it would have been difficult to explain, wouldn’t it? Let’s look in Green’s History Book and see what they looked like when it was His Most Christian Majesty King James the First.”

Perhaps it was this which decided the children, when the three days were over, to put on the clothes which most resembled the ones in the pictures of James I.’s time in Green’s History.

Edred had full breeches, puffed out like balloons, and a steeple-crowned hat, and a sort of tunic of crimson velvet, and a big starched ruff round his little neck more uncomfortable even than your Eton collar is after you’ve been wearing flannels for days and days. And Elfrida had long, tight stays with a large, flat-shaped piece of wood down the front, and very full, long skirts over a very abrupt hoop.

When the three days were over the door of the attic, which, as usual after a quarrel, had been quite invisible and impossible to find, had become as plain as the nose on the face of the plainest person you know, and the children had walked in, and looked in the chests till they found what they wanted.

And now they put on ruffs and all the rest of it to the accompaniment, or, as it always seemed, with the help, of soft pigeon noises.

While they were dressing Elfrida held the Brownie camera tightly, in one hand or the other. This made dressing rather slow and difficult, but the children had agreed that if it were not done the Brownie would be, as Edred put it, “liable to vanish,” as everything else belonging to their own time always did—except their clothes. I can’t explain to you just now how it was that their clothes didn’t vanish. It would take too long. But it was all part of the magic of white feathers which are, as you know, the clothes of white pigeons.

And now a very odd thing happened. As Edred put on his second shoe—which was the last touch to their united toilets—the walls seemed to tremble and shake and go crooked, like a house of cards at the very instant before it topples down. The floor slanted to that degree that standing on it was so difficult as to be at last impossible. The rafters all seemed to get crooked and mixed, like a box of matches when you spill them on the floor. The tiled roof that showed blue daylight through seemed to spin like a top, and you could not tell at all which way up you were. All this happened with dreadful suddenness, but almost as soon as it had begun it stopped with a jerk like that of a clockwork engine that has gone wrong. And the attic was gone—and the chests, and the blue-chinked tiles of the roof, and the walls and the rafters. And the room had shrunk to less than half its old size. And it was higher, and it was not an attic any more, but a round room with narrow windows, and just such a fireplace, with a stone hood, as the ones the children had seen when they looked down from the tops of the towers. You must have often heard of events that take people’s breath away. This sudden change did really take away the breaths of Edred and Elfrida, so that for a few moments they could only stare at each other “like Guy Fawkes masks,” as Elfrida later said.

“I see,” said Edred, when breath enough for speech had returned to him. “This is the place where the attic was after the tower fell to pieces.”

“But there isn’t any attic really,” said Elfrida. “You know we can’t find it if we quarrelled, and Mrs. Honeysett doesn’t ever find it. It isn’t anywhere.”

“Yes, it is,” said Edred. “We couldn’t find it if it wasn’t.”

“Well,” said Elfrida gloomily, “I only hope we may find it, that’s all. I suppose we may as well go out. It’s no use sticking in this horrid little room.” Her hand was on the door, but even as she fumbled with the latch, which was of iron and of a shape to which she was wholly unaccustomed, something else happened, even more disconcerting than the turn-over-change in which the attic and the chests had disappeared. It is very difficult to describe. Perhaps you happen to dislike travelling in trains with your back to the engine? If you do dislike it, you dislike it very much indeed. It makes your head ache, and gives you a queer feeling at the back of your neck, and makes you turn so pale that the grown-up people with whom you are travelling will ask you what is the matter, and sometimes heartlessly insist that the buns you had at the junction, or the chocolate creams pressed into your hand at the parting hour by Uncle Fred or Aunt Imogen, are the cause of your sufferings. The worst feeling of all is that terrible sensation, as though your heart and lungs and the front part of your waistcoat were being drawn slowly but surely through your backbone, and taken a very long way off.

The sensations which now held Edred and Elfrida were exactly like those which—if you don’t like travelling backwards—you know only too well—and the sensations were so acute that both children shut their eyes. The whirling feeling, and the withdrawing-waistcoat feeling, and the headache, and the back-of-the-neck feeling stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and the two children opened their eyes in a room which Edred at least had never seen before. To Elfrida it seemed strange yet familiar. The shape of the room, the position of doors and windows, the mantelpiece with its curious carvings—these she knew. And some of the furniture, too. Yet the room seemed bare—barer than it should have been. But why should it look bare—barer than it should have been—unless she knew how much less bare it once was? Unless, in fact, she had seen it before?

“Oh, I know,” she cried, standing in her stiff skirts and heavy shoes in the middle of the room. “I know. This is Lord Arden’s town house. This is where I was with Cousin Betty. Only there aren’t such nice chairs and things, and it was full of people then.”

Edred remained silent, his mouth half open and his eyes half shut in a sort of trance of astonishment. This was very different from the last adventure in which he had taken part. For then he had only gone to the house in Arden Castle as it was in Boney’s time, and he had gone to it by the simple means of walking down a staircase with which he was already familiar. But now he had been transported in a most violent and unpleasing manner, not only from his own times to times much earlier, but also from Arden Castle, which he knew, to Arden House, which he did not know. So he was silent, and when he did speak it was with discontent verging on disgust.

“I don’t like it,” he began. “Let’s go back. I don’t like it. And we didn’t take the photograph. And I don’t like it. And my clothes are horrid. I feel something between a balloon and a Bluecoat boy. And you’ve no idea how silly you look—like Mrs. Noah out of the Ark, only tubby. And I don’t know who we’re supposed to be. And I don’t suppose this is Arden House. And if it is, you don’t know when. Suppose it’s Inquisition times, and they put us on the stake? Let’s go back; I don’t like it,” he ended.

“Now you just listen,” said Elfrida, knitting her brows under the queer cap she wore. “I know inside me what I mean, but you won’t unless you jolly well attend.”

“Fire ahead.”

“Well, then, even if it was Inquisition times it would be all right—for us.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know how I know, but I know I do know,” said Elfrida firmly. “You see, I’ve been here before. It’s not real, you see.”

“It is,” said Edred, kicking the leg of the table.

“Yes, of course . . . but . . . look here! You remember the water-shoot at Earl’s Court, and you were so frightened.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were; and I didn’t half like it myself. I wished we hadn’t, rather. And when it started, and we knew we’d got to go on with it. Oh, horrible! And when it was over we wanted to go again, and we did, and it’s been so jolly to remember. This is like that. See?”

“I don’t,” said Edred, “understand a single word you say. This isn’t a bit like the water-shoot or anything. Now, is it?”

Elfrida frowned. Afterwards she was glad that she had done no more than frown. It is dangerous, as you know, to quarrel in a boat, but far more dangerous to quarrel in a century that is not your own. She frowned and opened her mouth. And just as her mouth opened the door of the room followed its example, and a short, dark, cross-looking woman in a brown skirt and strange cap came hurrying in.

“So it’s here you’ve hidden yourselves!” she cried. “And I looking high and low to change your dress.”

“What for?” said Edred, for it was his arm which she had quite ungently caught.

“For what?” she said, as she dragged him out of the room. “Why, to attend my lord your father and your lady mother at the masque at Whitehall. Had you forgot already? And thou so desirous to attend them in thy new white velvet broidered with the orange-tawny, and thy lady mother’s diamond buckles, and the silken cloak, and the shoe-roses, and the cobweb-lawn starched ruff, and the little sword and all.”

The woman had dragged Edred out of the room and by the stairs by this time. Elfrida, following, decided that her speech was the harshest part of her.

“If she was really horrid,” thought the girl, “she wouldn’t try to cheer him up with velvet and swords and diamond buckles.

“Can’t I go?” she said aloud.

The woman turned and slapped her—not hard, but smartly. “I told thee how it would be if thou wouldst not hold that dunning tongue. No; thou can’t go. Little ladies stay at home and sew their samplers. Thou’ll go to Court soon enough, I warrant.”

So Elfrida sat and watched while Edred was partially washed—the soap got in his eyes just as it gets in yours nowadays—and dressed in the beautiful white page’s dress, white velvet, diamond buckles, little sword, and all.

“You are splendid,” she said. “Oh, I do wish I was a boy!” she added, for perhaps the two thousand and thirty-second time in her short life.

“It’s not that thou’ll be wishing when thy time comes to go to Court,” said the woman. “There, my little lord, give thy old nurse a kiss and stand very cautious and perfect, not to soil thy fine feathers. And when thou hearest thy mother’s robes on the stairs go out and make thy bow like thy tutor taught thee.”