So Edward and Gustus have been to a good school, and now they are at Winchester, and presently they will be at Oxford. And when Gustus is twenty-one he will have half the money that came from the gold-mine. And then he and Edward mean to start a school of their own. And the boys who are to go to it are to be the sort of boys who go to the summer camp of the Grand Redoubt near the sea—the kind of boy that Gustus was.
So the spy-glass will do some good after all, though it was so unmanageable to begin with.
Perhaps it may even be found again. But [p57 I rather hope it won’t. It might, really, have done much more mischief than it did—and if any one found it, it might do more yet.
There is no moral to this story, except…. But no—there is no moral.
Quentin de Ward.
[p58]
III
ACCIDENTAL MAGIC; OR DON’T TELL ALL YOU KNOW
Quentin de Ward was rather a nice little boy, but he had never been with other little boys, and that made him in some ways a little different from other little boys. His father was in India, and he and his mother lived in a little house in the New Forest. The house—it was a cottage really, but even a cottage is a house, isn’t it?—was very pretty and thatched and had a porch covered with honeysuckle and ivy and white roses, and straight red hollyhocks were trained to stand up in a row against the south wall of it. The two lived quite alone, and as they had no one else to talk to they talked to each other a good deal. Mrs. de Ward read a great many books, and she used to tell Quentin about them afterwards. They were usually books about out of the way things, for Mrs. de Ward was interested in all the things that people are not quite sure about—the things that are hidden [p59 and secret, wonderful and mysterious—the things people make discoveries about. So that when the two were having their tea on the little brick terrace in front of the hollyhocks, with the white cloth flapping in the breeze, and the wasps hovering round the jam-pot, it was no uncommon thing for Quentin to say thickly through his bread and jam:—
‘I say, mother, tell me some more about Atlantis.’ Or, ‘Mother, tell me some more about ancient Egypt and the little toy-boats they made for their little boys.’ Or, ‘Mother, tell me about the people who think Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare.’