“Let’s go back to the attic and try and get back into our own time. I expect we just got in to the wrong door, don’t you? Let’s go now.”
“Oh, no,” said Elfrida. “How dreadfully dull! Why, we shall see all sorts of things, and be top in history for the rest of our lives. Let’s go through with it.”
“Do you remember which door it was—the attic, I mean?” Edred suddenly asked. “Was it the third on the left?”
“I don’t know. But we can easily find it when we want it.”
“I’d like to know now,” said Edred obstinately. “You never know when you are going to want things. Mrs. Honeysett says you ought always to be able to lay your hand on anything you want the moment you do want it. I should like to be quite certain about being able to lay our hands on our own clothes. Suppose some one goes and tidies them up. You know what people are.”
“All right,” said Elfrida, “we’ll go and tidy them up ourselves. It won’t take a minute.”
It would certainly not have taken five—if things had been as the children expected. They raced up the stairs to the corridor where the prints were.
“It’s not the first door, I’m certain,” said Edred, so they opened the second. But it was not that either. So then they tried all the doors in turn, even opening, at last, the first one of all. And it was not that, even. It was not any of them.
“We’ve come to the wrong corridor,” said the boy.
“It’s the only one,” said the girl. And it was. For though they hunted all over the house, upstairs and downstairs, and tried every door, the door of the attic they could not find again. And what is more, when they came to count up, there were fifty-seven doors without it.