When they had reached a green meadow that sloped pleasantly to the willow-fringed edge of the river Medway, Charlotte said:
‘You were invisible, to him. That’s the magic. Perhaps you’ll believe in spells now.’
‘But there wasn’t any spell,’ said Rupert impatiently.
And the girls said with one voice, ‘You take off your blazer and see.’
‘I hate hanky panky,’ said Rupert, but he took off the coat.
‘Look, in there,’ said Caroline, turning back that loose fold which the button-holes are made in—‘fern-seed. Char and I seccotined it on while you and Charles were washing your hands. We meant to ask you to wish to be invisible when we went into a shop or something, just to prove about spells, but you did it without our asking. And now you will believe, won’t you?’
‘I can’t,’ said Rupert; ‘don’t talk about it any more. Let’s have the grub out.’
They opened the parcels and ‘had the grub out,’ and it was sandwiches, and jam-tarts packed face to face, and raspberries in a card-board box that had once held chocolates—that was in Rupert’s parcel—and biscuits, and large wedges of that pleasant solid cake which you still get sometimes in old-fashioned houses where baking powder and self-raising flour are unknown.
‘This is the first picnic we’ve ever had by ourselves; don’t you like it, Prince Rupert?’
Rupert’s mouth was full of sandwich. He was understood to say that it was ‘all right.’