And the girls said, ‘Do let him’; so Rupert said, ‘All right, he didn’t mind.’
Charlotte said she thought she would be Charles the Second, because he was a merry monarch; but it was decided that it might be confusing to have two Charles’s; so she had to be content with being Joan of Arc, while Caroline was Boadicea.
‘She was British, you see,’ Caroline explained; ‘and Aunt Emmeline says you ought to support home industries.’
‘Now we all call each other by our play names all day,’ Charlotte said, ‘and if you make a mistake you lose a mark.’
‘Who keeps the marks?’
‘You keep your own, of course—counting on your fingers. And if you did it ten times, you’d tie a knot in your handkerchief. Aunts do it ten times if they play often. We don’t.’
Here Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Prince Rupert, and King Charles turned out of the lodge gate, and the exploring expedition began at seventeen minutes past ten, precisely. The three C.’s kept up the game, calling each other by the new names with frequency and accurateness; but Rupert grew more and more silent, and when Charlotte addressed him as Prince Rupert the stainless knight, he told her not to be silly.
At a quarter-past twelve, the four children, very dusty, very hot and rather tired, reached a level crossing. The gates were shut because a train was coming, and already, as you looked along the line, you could see the front of the engine getting bigger and blacker, and the steam from it getting whiter and puffier, and you could feel the vibration of its coming in the shuddering of the gate as you leaned on it.
The train stopped, in a snorting, panting hurry, at the little station just beside the gates, let out a few passengers, shook itself impatiently, screamed, and went on. The big gates across the road swung slowly back till they stretched across the railway, and the people who had got out of the train came down the sloping end of the platform and through the small swing-gates, and the four children, who were crossing the line, met the little crowd from the train half-way. There were two women with baskets, a man with a bandy-legged dog, and a girl with a large band-box partly hidden by brown paper, and—the four children were face to face with him before they knew that there was any one coming from that train whom they had rather not be face to face with—the Murdstone man himself. He was not a yard from them. Rupert threw up his head and backed a little as if he expected to be hit. The three C.’s breathed a deep concerted ‘Oh!’ and trembled on the edge of what might be going to happen. No one knew what Mr. Murdstone’s power might be. Could he seize on Rupert and take him away? Could he call the police? Anything seemed possible in that terrible instant when they were confronted, suddenly and beyond hope of retreat, with the hated master.