They had only just emerged when the strokes of a great bell came pealing up from the town below; Allen and his mother looked at each other in amused dismay, then at their watches. It was twelve o’clock! Two hours had passed like as many minutes, and the boys would be coming home to dinner.
“Ah! well, we must go,” said Carey, as they gathered up their armloads of flowers. “You naughty children to make me forget everything.”
“You are not sorry you came though, mother. It has done you good,” said Allen solicitously. He was the most affectionate of them all.
“Sorry! I feel as if I cared for nothing while I have a place like that to drink up delight in.”
With which they tried to make their way back to the path again, but it was not immediately to be found; and their progress was further impeded by a wood-pigeon dwelling impressively on the notes “Take two cows, Taffy; Taffy take TWO!” and then dashing out, flapping and grey, in their faces, rather to Barbara’s alarm, and then by Armine’s stumbling on his first bird’s nest, a wren’s in the moss of an old stump, where the tiny bird unadvisedly flew out of her leafy hole full before their eyes. That was a marvel of marvels, a delight equal to that felt by any explorer the world has seen. Armine and Barbara, who lived in one perpetual fairy tale, were saying to one another that
“One needn’t make believe here, it was every bit real.”
“And more;” added the other little happy voice. Barbara did however begin to think of the numerous children in the wood, and to take comfort that it was unprecedented that their mother and big brother should be with them, but they found the park palings at last, and then a little wicket gate, where they were very near home.
“Mother, where have you been?” exclaimed Janet, somewhat suddenly emerging from the door.
“In Tom Tiddler’s ground, picking up gold and silver,” said Carey, pointing to the armsful of king-cups, cuckoo-flowers, and anemones, besides blue-bells, orchises, primroses, &c. “My poor child, it was a great shame to leave you, but they got me into the enchanted land and I forgot all about everything.”
“I think so,” said a gravely kind voice, and Caroline was aware of Ellen’s eye looking at her as the Court Queen might have looked at Ophelia if she had developed her taste for “long purples” as Hamlet’s widow. At least so it struck Mother Carey, who immediately became conscious that her bonnet was awry, having been half pulled off by a bramble, that her ankles were marked by the bog, and that bits of green were sticking all over her.