‘Was it a dream last night?’ they all asked him, in an eager chorus. ‘When you came to the window?’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ he said flatly. ‘Only I was so afraid of being nabbed. So I got out early and put the shelves back and the pillows on the bed, and I took the biscuits; I thought you wouldn’t mind——’
‘Not a bit. Rather not’—chorus of polite hospitality.
‘And I got out of your dressing-room window and down the ivy; it was quite easy. And I cut across the grass and in under those fancy sort of fir-trees, the ones that drag their branches—you know—in the avenue. And I saw you come out, but the place was all thick with gardeners and people. So I waited till their dinner-bell rang, and then I crept out here, and I was just going to say “Hi!” when you stuck that green stuff on your eyes. It looks nasty. What did you do it for?’
They told him.
‘That’s rummy,’ he said, sitting among them quite at his ease, with one hand in his pocket. ‘Because I knew fern-seed made you invisible—it says so in Shakespeare, you know,—and I ate a bit coming along, just on the chance it might be some good—so that no one should see me, you know—and nobody did till you did. So,’ he went on more slowly, ‘perhaps I was really invisible until you put the fern-seed on your eyes.’
‘What a perfectly splendid idea!’ cried Charlotte. ‘Because that makes it all true. We were most awfully sick when we thought it had only just made us dream. I say! Do, now, do tell us how you ran away and why—and what you’re going to do, and everything.’
‘I thought,’ Rupert answered carelessly, ‘of running away to sea. But it’s a long way to the coast. I would much rather stop here with you. Couldn’t you hide me in a log-hut or something, like a runaway slave? Just till they stopped looking for me. And I could write to my father in India and ask him to let me stay here instead of with old Mug’s brother. Couldn’t you hide me till the answer came?’
‘We could try,’ said Charles, a little doubtfully.
But Charlotte said, ‘Of course we can—we will! Only, why are you so different? You seem miles older than you were when we saw you on the platform.’