Uncle.
‘How sweet of him,’ the girls agreed, and Charles wanted to know what sort of expenses he meant.
‘“Incidental”? Oh, if you want an apple or some chocks in a hurry and don’t happen to have any on you,’ Rupert explained. ‘Or ginger beer. Or raw eggs to suck as you go along; they’re very sustaining when all other food’s despaired of.’
The Uncle must have given orders, for Harriet soon brought in four neat brown-paper parcels.
‘Your lunches,’ she said. ‘Hope you’ll enjoy yourselves. You’ve got a nice day for your outing. Bring me a keepsake, won’t you? from wherever it is you’re going to.’
‘Of course we will,’ said Charlotte. ‘What would you like?’
But Harriet laughed, and said she was only talking.
They put on their thinnest clothes, for it was a very hot day, and they got William to cut them ash-sticks, ‘in case we want to be pilgrims with staffs,’ said Charles. The girls were very anxious for Rupert to wear his school blazer, and so flattering were their opinions of it, and of him, and of it on him, and of him in it, that he consented. Charles wore his school blazer, and the girls’ frocks were of blue muslin, and they had their soft white muslin hats, so they looked very bright and yet very cool as they started off down the drive with their ash-sticks over their shoulders and their brown-paper parcels in knotted handkerchiefs dangling from the ends of the sticks.
‘Who shall we be?’ Charlotte asked, as they passed into the shadow of the woods where the road runs through to the lodge gate.
‘I’ll be Nansen,’ said Charles. ‘I wish we had some Equismo dogs and a sledge.’