The children agreed that it must have been a dream, after the eating of the fern-seed, for all of them, for some reason that I can’t understand, agreed that the fern-seed eating, at any rate, was real.
Breakfast seemed less interesting than usual, and when, after the meal, Mrs. Wilmington minced a request to them to go out for the morning, ‘the same as you were requisted to do yisterday,’ they went with slow footsteps and boots strangely weighty.
‘Let’s get out of sight of the house,’ said Charlotte heavily.
They went away beyond the shrubbery, to the wood where there were oak-trees and hazels and dog-wood and silver birches and here and there a black yew, with open bracken-feathered glades between. Here they found a little glade between a honeysuckle and a sweet chestnut and a hazel thicket, flattened the bracken, and sat down amid the sweet scent of it.
‘To hold a council about the wonderful dream we’ve all of us had,’ said Caroline slowly.
But the council, if it could be called one, was brief and languid.
‘I’d rather think first,’ said Caroline. And the others said so would they.
‘I could think better with my head on your lap, Caro,’ Charles said.
And Charlotte murmured, ‘Bunch the fern up closer under my back, Caro.’