that made the whole business so mysterious. Further, he and his sister had managed somehow to go back a hundred years. He knew this quite well, though he had no evidence but that one sheet of newspaper. He felt it, as they say, in his bones. I don’t know how it was, perhaps the air felt a hundred years younger. Shepherds and country people can tell the hour of night by the feel of the air. So perhaps very sensitive people can tell the century by much the same means. These, of course, would be the people to whom adventures in times past or present would be likely to happen. We must always consider what is likely, especially when we are reading stories about unusual things.
‘I say,’ Edred whispered presently, ‘we’ve got back to 1807. That paper says so.’
‘I know,’ Elfrida whispered. So she must have had more of that like-shepherds-telling-the time-of-night feeling than even her brother.
‘I wish I could remember what was happening in history in 1807,’ said Elfrida, ‘but we never get past Edward IV. We always have to go back to the Saxons because of the new girls.’
‘But we’re not in history. We’re at Arden,’ Edred said.
‘We are in history. It’ll be awful not even knowing who’s king,’ said Elfrida; and then the stiff old lady looked up over very large spectacles with thick silver rims, and said:
‘Silence!’
Presently she laid down the Times and got ink and paper – no envelopes – and began to write. She was finishing a letter, the large sheet was almost covered on one side. When she had covered it quite, she turned it round and began to write across it. She used a white goose-quill pen. The inkstand was of china, with gold scrolls and cupids and wreaths of roses painted on it. On one side was the ink-well, on the other a thing like a china pepper-pot, and in front a tray for the pens and sealing-wax to lie in. Both children now knew their unpleasant poem by heart; so they watched the old lady, who was grandmother to the children she supposed them to be. When she had finished writing she sprinkled some dust out of the pepper-pot over the letter to dry the ink. There was no blotting-paper to be seen. Then she folded the sheet, and sealed it with a silver seal from the pen-tray, and wrote the address on the outside. Then—
‘Have you got your task?’ she asked.
‘Here it is,’ said Elfrida, holding up the book.
‘No impudence, miss!’ said the grandmother sternly. ‘You very well know that I mean, have you got it by rote yet? And you know, too, that you should say “ma’am” whenever you address me.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Elfrida; and this was taken to mean that she knew her task.
‘Then come and say it. No, no; you know better than that. Feet in the first position, hands behind you, heads straight, and do not fidget with your feet.’
So then first Elfrida and then Edred recited the melancholy verses.
‘Now,’ said the old lady, ‘you may go and play in the garden.’
‘Mayn’t we take your letter to the post?’ Elfrida asked.
‘Yes; but you are not to stay in the “George” bar, mind, not even if Mrs. Skinner should invite you. Just hand her the letter and come out. Shut the door softly, and do not shuffle with your feet.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Elfrida; and on that they got out.
‘They’ll find us out – bound to,’ said Edred; ‘we don’t know a single thing about anything. I don’t know where the “George” is, or where to get a stamp, or anything.’
‘We must find someone we can trust, and tell them the truth,’ said Elfrida.
‘There isn’t anyone,’ said Edred, ‘that I’d trust. You can’t trust the sort of people who stick this sort of baby flummery round a chap’s neck.’ He crumpled his starched frill with hot, angry fingers.
‘Mine prickles all round, too,’ Elfrida reminded him, ‘and it’s lower, and you get bigger as you go down, so it prickles more of me than yours does you.’
‘Let’s go back to the attic and try and get back into our own time. I expect we just got in to the wrong door, don’t you? Let’s go now.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Elfrida. ‘How dreadfully dull! Why, we shall see all sorts of things, and be top in history for the rest of our lives. Let’s go through with it.’
‘Do you remember which door it was – the attic, I mean?’ Edred suddenly asked. ‘Was it the third on the left?’
‘I don’t know. But we can easily find it when we want it.’
‘I’d like to know now,’ said Edred obstinately. ‘You never know when you are going to want things. Mrs. Honeysett says you ought always to be able to lay your hand on anything you want the moment you do want it. I should like to be quite certain about being able to lay our hands on our own clothes. Suppose someone goes and tidies them up. You know what people are.’
‘All right,’ said Elfrida, ‘we’ll go and tidy them up ourselves. It won’t take a minute.’
It would certainly not have taken five – if things had been as the children expected. They raced up the stairs to the corridor where the prints were.
‘It’s not the first door, I’m certain,’ said Edred, so they opened the second. But it was not that either. So then they tried all the doors in turn, even opening, at last, the first one of all. And it was not that, even. It was not any of them.
‘We’ve come to the wrong corridor,’ said the boy.
‘It’s the only one,’ said the girl. And it was. For though they hunted all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and tried every door, the door of the attic they could not find again. And what is more, when they came to count up, there were fifty-seven doors without it.
‘Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven,’ said Elfrida, and ended in a sob, – ‘the door’s gone! We shall have to stay here for ever and ever. Oh, I want auntie – I do, I do!
She sat down abruptly on a small green mat in front of the last door, which happened to be that of the kitchen.
Edred says he did not cry too. And if what he says is true, Elfrida’s crying must have been louder than was usual with her; for the kitchen door opened, and the two children were caught up in two fat arms and hurried into a pleasant kitchen, where bright brass and copper pots hung on the walls, and between a large fire and a large meat screen a leg of mutton turned round and round with nobody to help it.
‘Hold your noise,’ said the owner of the fat arms, who now proved to be a very stout woman in a chocolate-coloured print gown sprigged with blue roses. She had a large linen apron and a cap with flappy frills, and between the frills just such another good, kind, jolly face as Mrs. Honeysett’s own. ‘Here, stop your mouths,’ she said, ‘or your granny’ll be after you – to say nothing of Boney. Stop your crying, do, and see what cookie’s got for you.’
She opened a tin canister and picked out two lumps of brown stuff that looked like sand – about the size and shape of prunes they were.
‘What’s that?’ Edred asked.
‘Drabbit
