“Yes,” said a soft, musical voice. Peggy looked towards the dressing-table, and there was Lady Grace pinning on her hat. She came and kissed Peggy. “I am sure you will like Toyland, dear,” she said, “and it is a great honour to be taken there.”
Both Wooden and Lady Grace seemed to be grown up all of a sudden, and ready to take care of Peggy, instead of her taking care of them. Lady Grace had on the beautiful French clothes in which she had come, and Wooden was dressed in her purple velvet jacket and her grey tailor-made skirt. She wore the straw hat that had come at the same time as Rose, and looked very nice altogether, but a little different, because her nose was now perfect, and her face and eyes and hair had got all their colour back. She had a wonderfully kind and simple expression of face, and Peggy felt that it would be quite safe to go anywhere with her.
Teddy was also life-size. Peggy had always known that he was of a very cheerful nature, for his face had always seemed to be laughing at some joke. But he seemed to be rather forward in his manners, for as Lady Grace kissed Peggy he said with a sort of crow, “What ho, girls! You jump up and sit alongside me, my lady, and we’ll have a nice little chat as we go along.”
“Be careful, Teddy,” said Wooden in a warning voice.
“Oh, I’ll be careful all right,” said Teddy encouragingly. “Oh, what larks we’re going to have!”
Lady Grace got up in front of the car, and Peggy and Wooden behind. It was not Peggy’s father’s car, but a toy one which had been given to her. But it was now big enough to hold all four of them comfortably.
Teddy sounded his horn and gave a whoop of joy, and the car drove straight out of the bedroom into the garden, though how it got there from her nursery on the first floor Peggy could never remember.
Now, although it had been winter when Peggy went to bed, and the thermometer on the pergola outside had registered two degrees of frost, it had suddenly become the most delicious spring and summer weather combined. When Peggy saw the garden she clapped her hands with delight. Never was seen such a blaze of colour. Everything was out at once—all the trees, and all the shrubs, and all the flowers. The house was smothered in roses and honeysuckle and clematis. The daffodils were dancing in the grass. The rhododendrons and azaleas flamed against the green of the darker shrubs. Every flower in the long border was in full bloom, from the scarlet anemones of the early spring to the yellow sunflowers and Michaelmas daisies of the late autumn; and so were the lilacs, white and purple, the guelder roses, the syringas, the may-trees and laburnums, the pink almond, and the Pyrus Malus Floribunda, which was Peggy’s favourite tree, though she never quite got its name right. There were thousands of blooms in the rose garden; the climbing roses trained over the pergola were as gay as gay could be; and even the newly-planted nut-walk had grown twelve feet in a few hours, and made a shady green tunnel through which you could see the park beyond.
But there was not much time to take in all the wonders of the garden, for Teddy whirled them through it in no time, out into the road and down to the village. The car seemed to be going faster than Peggy’s father’s big new one, but it travelled so easily and so smoothly that Peggy, who was a little nervous of motors going very fast, said, “What a nice drive we’re having!” As they passed the clock over the Abbey gateway the hands were pointing to twelve o’clock, and Peggy, who could of course tell the time, knew somehow that it was really twelve o’clock at night, and not twelve o’clock in the daytime, although the sun was shining with all its might. And as they turned and drove up the village street all the windows had their blinds down, and there were no people about.