The sensations which now held Edred and Elfrida were exactly like those which—if you don’t like travelling backwards—you know only too well—and the sensations were so acute that both children shut their eyes. The whirling feeling, and the withdrawing-waistcoat feeling, and the headache, and the back-of-the-neck feeling stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and the two children opened their eyes in a room which Edred at least had never seen before. To Elfrida it seemed strange yet familiar. The shape of the room, the position of doors and windows, the mantelpiece with its curious carvings—these she knew. And some of the furniture, too. Yet the room seemed bare—barer than it should have been. But why should it look bare—barer than it should have been—unless she knew how much less bare it once was? Unless, in fact, she had seen it before?
“Oh, I know,” she cried, standing in her stiff skirts and heavy shoes in the middle of the room. “I know. This is Lord Arden’s town house. This is where I was with Cousin Betty. Only there aren’t such nice chairs and things, and it was full of people then.”
Edred remained silent, his mouth half open and his eyes half shut in a sort of trance of astonishment. This was very different from the last adventure in which he had taken part. For then he had only gone to the house in Arden Castle as it was in Boney’s time, and he had gone to it by the simple means of walking down a staircase with which he was already familiar. But now he had been transported in a most violent and unpleasing manner, not only from his own times to times much earlier, but also from Arden Castle, which he knew, to Arden House, which he did not know. So he was silent, and when he did speak it was with discontent verging on disgust.
“I don’t like it,” he began. “Let’s go back. I don’t like it. And we didn’t take the photograph. And I don’t like it. And my clothes are horrid. I feel something between a balloon and a Bluecoat boy. And you’ve no idea how silly you look—like Mrs. Noah out of the Ark, only tubby. And I don’t know who we’re supposed to be. And I don’t suppose this is Arden House. And if it is, you don’t know when. Suppose it’s Inquisition times, and they put us on the stake? Let’s go back; I don’t like it,” he ended.
“Now you just listen,” said Elfrida, knitting her brows under the queer cap she wore. “I know inside me what I mean, but you won’t unless you jolly well attend.”
“Fire ahead.”
“Well, then, even if it was Inquisition times it would be all right—for us.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know how I know, but I know I do know,” said Elfrida firmly. “You see, I’ve been here before. It’s not real, you see.”
“It is,” said Edred, kicking the leg of the table.