"And I don't like snow at all, Muvvie," replied Mavis. "We were building castles in the air just now, and mine was to live in a lovely wood where it was never really winter."
"My castle was to be a chauffeur or a lady detective!" laughed Merle. "Perhaps both! It would be great sport to go dashing about the country in a car, unravelling mysteries and catching jewel thieves. Will you come with me, Mavis?"
Mavis shook her head.
"I've told you I'm going to live in a house with an enormous garden, and a wood where I can watch the birds. I'd rather track tomtits than jewel thieves. You shall come and stay with me when you're tired of chasing your burglars. It will be fine and warm in my wood, with no slushy snow ever, or yellow fog, only lovely flowers and ferns the whole year round, and I shall go out without being eternally wrapped up. That's my castle in the air!"
"Don't you wish you may get it, that's all! It sounds like El Dorado. Oh, I'll come and stay with you right enough when you find such a fairyland. Woods like that don't grow near Whinburn. Look at the sky now! It's actually trying to snow again!"
"It won't snow in my wood!"
"And I say such woods don't exist except in your imagination," declared Merle emphatically.
"Not quite the fairy land Mavis pictures, but there's a very good approach to them in Devonshire," said Mrs. Ramsay. "I've something I want to tell you chicks. How would you like to go to Durracombe and stay with Uncle David and Aunt Nellie? Don't look so incredulous! It's really true. We've arranged to send you for three months, and I'm to take you down there next week."
This was news indeed, such news that at first the girls were hardly able to believe it. They had never been in Devonshire, and had not seen their mother's uncle, Dr. Tremayne. Their father, Dr. Ramsay, busy with his own professional work, had little time to spare for visiting, and when he snatched a holiday the family had generally gone to Scotland, or to some east-coast seaside resort. He was fond of the north, which has a charm all its own, but his wife was a Devon woman, who could not forget the county of her birth. She had told her children stories of its beauties, its mild air, its early flowers, its legends of pixies, its smugglers' coves and blue stretches of sea, its moors and dancing brooks, till they had come to look upon it as a sort of Elfland, a fairy-tale country that had no more real existence than the kingdom at the top of Jack's beanstalk. Uncle David and Aunt Nellie, too, though familiar household names, were entities as unsubstantial as characters in a book. To go and stay with them at Durracombe seemed as amazing as a visit to Robinson Crusoe's island or a sojourn with Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Seas. When their minds were adjusted to the new idea they demanded details.
"Three months! We shall miss school for a whole term. Oh, Mummie, what fun! Shall we find cowslips in the fields? And can we go paddling in the brook? It sounds gorgeous!"