“Oh,” said Elfrida, then, “I am so glad it’s not at midnight you’ve got to say the spell. You’d be too frightened.”
“I shouldn’t,” said Edred, very pale and walking quickly away from the castle. “I should say it just the same if it was midnight.” And he very nearly believed what he said.
Elfrida it was who had picked up the paper that Edred had dropped when that thing moved in the corner. She still held it fast.
“I expect it was only a rat or something,” said Edred, his heart beating nineteen to the dozen, as they say in Kent and elsewhere.
“Oh, yes,” said Elfrida, whose lips were trembling a little; “I’m sure it was only a rat or something.”
When they got to the top of Arden Knoll there was no sign of sunset. There was time, therefore, to pull oneself together, to listen to the skylarks, and to smell the bean-flowers, and to wonder how one could have been such a duffer as to be scared by a “rat or something.” Also there were some bits of sandwich and crumbled cake, despised at dinner-time, but now, somehow, tasting quite different. These helped to pass the time till the sun almost seemed to rest on a brown shoulder of the downs, that looked as though it were shrugging itself up to meet the round red ball that the evening mists had made of the sun.
The children had not spoken for several minutes. Their four eyes were fixed on the sun, and as the edge of it seemed to flatten itself against the hill-shoulder Elfrida whispered, “Now!” and gave her brother the paper.
They had read the spell so often, as they sat there in the waning light, that both knew it by heart, so there was no need for Edred to read it. And that was lucky, for in that thick, pink light the faint ink hardly showed at all on the yellowy paper.
Edred stood up.
“Now!” said Elfrida, again. “Say it now.” And Edred said, quite out loud and in a pleasant sort of sing-song, such as he was accustomed to use at school when reciting the stirring ballads of the late Lord Macaulay, or the moving tale of the boy on the burning deck:—