“That’s clever of you,” said Elfrida.
“Well, I bet we find traces of its existence, when we’ve found the treasure. Come on; let’s try the chests again. We’ll put on the first things we find, and chance it, this time. There’s nothing to stop us. We haven’t quarrelled or anything.”
They had not quarrelled, but there was something to stop them, all the same. And that something was the fact that they could not find The Door. It simply was not there.
“And we haven’t quarrelled or anything,” said Elfrida, despairing when they had searched the East House again and again, and found no door that would consent to lead them to the wonderful attic where the chests stood in their two wonderful rows. She sat down on the top step of the attic stairs, quite regardless of the dust that lay there thick.
“It’s all up—I can see that,” said Edred. “We’ve muffed it somehow. I wonder whether we oughtn’t to have taken those photographs.”
“Do you think perhaps . . . could we have dreamed it all?”
“No,” said Edred, “there are the prints—at least, I suppose they’re there. We’ll go down and see.”
Miserably doubting, they went down and saw that the photographs were where they had put them, in between the pages of the “History of Arden.”
“I don’t see what we can do. Do you?” said Edred forlornly. It was a miserable ending to the happenings that had succeeded each other in such a lively procession ever since they had been at Arden. It seemed as though a door had been shut in their faces, and “Not any more,” written in very plain letters across the chapter of their adventures.
“I wish we could find the witch again,” said Elfrida; “but she said she couldn’t come into these times more than once.”