spell cannot always be relied upon to work. At any rate, none of the children woke till Jane came to draw up the blinds and let the half-past seven sunshine into their rooms.
Then Caroline woke quite thoroughly, looked at her little watch, and leaped out of bed.
‘What’s the hurry, Miss?’ asked Jane, as Caroline stood, a little unsteadily, in the middle of the room, rubbing her eyes and yawning. ‘It hasn’t but just gone the half-hour.’
‘I was dreaming,’ said Caroline; and when Jane was gone she shook Charlotte and said, ‘I say! Did anything happen last night?’
‘No,’ said Charlotte, behaving like a dormouse.
Caroline caught up her dressing-gown and crept along to Charles’s room. He was sitting up in bed, looking wildly at the wardrobe. Its doors were open, and there was nothing on the shelves (which were all in their proper places) except clean paper and little bags of lavender that smelt sweet through their white muslin veils.
‘Whatever’s happened?’ asked Caroline, fearing the worst.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Charles, rather crossly. ‘Only I had a silly dream, and when I woke up I thought it was true, and of course it wasn’t.’
‘I thought it was a dream, too, when I first woke. And Charlotte says nothing happened last night. What did you dream?’
He told her a little.
‘But I dreamed all that, too,’ said Caroline anxiously. ‘About the fern-seed and Rupert, and our playing Arab Saracens and hunting the biscuits. We couldn’t both dream the same thing. Where did you put the biscuits in your dream—what was left of them?’
‘You put them on the dressing-table.’
‘Well, they aren’t there now,’ said she.
‘Then it was a dream,’ said he; ‘and we both dreamed it.’
The two looked at each other blankly.
‘I dreamed I dressed his wounds—sponged his feet, I mean,’ she added, after a pause full of doubt. ‘The mud was thick—if it wasn’t a dream it’ll be in the basin.’
But Jane knew her duty too well for there to be anything in the basin except a bright brass can of hot water with a clean towel laid neatly across it.
‘Well, the fern-seed did something, anyhow, if it only made us both dream like that,’ said Caroline. But Charles wanted to know how she knew they hadn’t dreamed the fern-seed as well.
‘Oh, you get dressed,’ said his sister shortly, and went to her own dressing.
Charlotte, when really roused, owned that she remembered Rupert’s coming. But, if he had come, he had gone and left no trace. And it is rare for boys to do that.
The children agreed that it must have been a dream, after the eating of the fern-seed, for all of them, for some reason that I can’t understand, agreed that the fern-seed eating, at any rate, was real.
Breakfast seemed less interesting than usual, and when, after the meal, Mrs. Wilmington minced a request to them to go out for the morning, ‘the same as you were requisted to do yisterday,’ they went with slow footsteps and boots strangely weighty.
‘Let’s get out of sight of the house,’ said Charlotte heavily.
They went away beyond the shrubbery, to the wood where there were oak-trees and hazels and dog-wood and silver birches and here and there a black yew, with open bracken-feathered glades between. Here they found a little glade between a honeysuckle and a sweet chestnut and a hazel thicket, flattened the bracken, and sat down amid the sweet scent of it.
‘To hold a council about the wonderful dream we’ve all of us had,’ said Caroline slowly.
But the council, if it could be called one, was brief and languid.
‘I’d rather think first,’ said Caroline. And the others said so would they.
‘I could think better with my head on your lap, Caro,’ Charles said.
And Charlotte murmured, ‘Bunch the fern up closer under my back, Caro.’
And when the sun came over the top of the sweet chestnut it fell upon a warm and comfortable heap of children asleep.
You really can’t stay up all night, or even dream that you stay up, and then hold important councils next day just as though nothing had happened.
When the children awoke, because the sun had crept up over the sweet chestnut and was shining straight into their eyes, everything looked different and much more interesting.
‘I tell you what,’ said Charlotte. ‘Let’s do fern-seed again.’
‘It’s only on the eve of——’ Charles began, but Charlotte interrupted.
‘The seed goes on when once you’ve planted it—chewed it, I mean. I’m certain it does. If we don’t see anything, we may dream something more.’
‘There wouldn’t be time for a really thick dream before dinner,’ Charles objected.
‘Never mind! Let’s try. If we are late for dinner we’d tell the truth and say that we fell asleep in the woods. There’s such heaps of fern here it would be simply silly not to try.’
There was something in this. Fern-seed was chewed once more. Bracken, I have heard really well-educated people say, is not a fern at all, but it seemed a fern to them. And it certainly did its best to act up to what was expected of it. For when the three removed the little green damp pads from their eyes and blinked at the green leaves, there in the thick of them was Rupert, looking at them between the hazel thicket and the honeysuckle—a real live Rupert, and no dream-nonsense about him.
‘Was it a dream last night?’ they all asked him, in an eager chorus. ‘When you came to the window?’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ he said flatly. ‘Only I was so afraid of being nabbed. So I got out early and put the shelves back and the pillows on the bed, and I took the biscuits; I thought you wouldn’t mind——’
‘Not a bit. Rather not’—chorus of polite hospitality.
‘And I got out of your dressing-room window and down the ivy; it was quite easy. And I cut across the grass and in under those fancy sort of fir-trees, the ones that drag their branches—you know—in the avenue. And I saw you come out, but the place was all thick with gardeners and people. So I waited till their dinner-bell rang, and then I crept out here, and I was just going to say “Hi!” when you stuck that green stuff on your eyes. It looks nasty. What did you do it for?’
They told him.
‘That’s rummy,’ he said, sitting among them quite at his ease, with one hand in his pocket. ‘Because I knew fern-seed made you invisible—it says so in Shakespeare, you know,—and I ate a bit coming along, just on the chance it might be some good—so that no one should see me, you know—and nobody did till you did. So,’ he went on more slowly, ‘perhaps I was really
