A hand was raised.
CHAPTER V
THE MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE
Now, the fern-seed was only warranted to show the invisible, not to make the unhearable heard. If there should be no sound when that raised hand tapped at the window, then the children would know that the fern-seed was doing what it was warranted to do by the Latin book. If, on the other hand, the hand tapped and made, in tapping, the usual noise produced by a common tapper, then one of two things might be true. Either the fern-seed was stronger than the Latin book bargained for, and was able to make people hear the unhearable even if they did not cover their ears with the charm that had covered their eyes, or else the fern-seed spell was all nonsense and the face outside the window was a real person’s face and the hand was a real person’s hand, and the tap that was coming on the window was a really-tap that would sound hard and rattly on the glass of the window, as taps sound when fingers of bone and flesh make them.
All the children felt quite sure that they were not at all sure whether they wanted the face to be the face of a real person, or whether they wished it to be the Invisible made visible by fern-seed. But when the hand tapped at the window and a sound came to the children within—a sound quite distinct, and just the noise you or I might make if we tapped at a window and didn’t want every one in the house to hear us—the children, though startled, no longer felt any doubt as to what they wished that face to be.
‘It’s only a real person,’ whispered Charles, and sighed deeply.
‘It’s only a boy,’ said Caroline. ‘What does he want?’
‘It’s that Rupert chap we saw in the train,’ said Charlotte.