“Aha!” said Edred; “now you’ll see. I’m not mean about money. I brought my new florin.”
“Oh, Edred,” said the girl, stricken with remorse, “you are noble.”
“Pooh!” said the boy, and his ears grew red with mingled triumph and modesty; “that’s nothing. Come on.”
So it was from the train that the pilgrims got their first sight of Arden Castle. It stands up boldly on the cliff where it was set to keep off foreign foes and guard the country round about it. But of all its old splendour there is now nothing but the great walls that the grasses and wild flowers grow on, and round towers whose floors and ceilings have fallen away, and roofless chambers where owls build, and brambles and green ferns grow strong and thick.
The children walked to the castle along the cliff path where the skylarks were singing like mad up in the pale sky, and the bean-fields, where the bees were busy, gave out the sweetest scent in the world—a scent that got itself mixed with the scent of the brown seaweed that rises and falls in the wash of the tide on the rocks at the cliff-foot.
“Let’s have dinner here,” said Elfrida, when they reached the top of a little mound from which they could look down on the castle. So they had it.
Two bites of sandwich and one of peppermint cream; that was the rule.
And all the time they were munching they looked down on the castle, and loved it more and more.
“Don’t you wish it was real, and we lived in it?” Elfrida asked, when they had eaten as much as they wanted—not of peppermint creams, of course; but they had finished them.
“It is real, what there is of it.”