Aunt Grace had gone to a garden-party, and the three children were spending a blissful afternoon in the wood. Emmeline had curled herself up comfortably with a story-book, but the twins happened to be Red Indians that day, and had gone off on a desperate expedition against the Pale Faces. Before long they came rushing back to Emmeline, and insisted on dragging her off to see ‘something wonderful.’
‘Something wonderful’ proved to be merely an empty cottage, hardly more than a hut, indeed, which, from its broken windows, torn thatch, worm-eaten door, and altogether forlorn appearance, looked as if it had been deserted for several years. Emmeline grasped its capabilities at first sight, and when the twins led her inside and triumphantly displayed a three-legged chair with a broken seat, and part of what had once been a table—when she saw the grate, rusty and cobwebbed with disuse, but a real grate nevertheless, she was quite ready to agree with them that the story people had found their ideal house at last.
‘Isn’t this perfectly lovely?’ said Kitty, dancing about. ‘And, Emmeline, it has two rooms. Come and see the other one.’
The other room contained nothing at all except somebody’s very old boot, and a straw hat with the crown almost out, both of which Kitty pointed out as great finds. Emmeline, however, was left cold by these treasures.
‘They look as if they had belonged to rather dirty people,’ she said. ‘I think we’d better clear them out. Besides,’ she added, as Kitty looked disappointed, ‘this is a Feudal Castle, and they are not the sort of things people in Feudal Castles would wear.’
From that time forward the empty cottage was always known as the Feudal Castle. It was felt to be a most brilliant suggestion of Emmeline’s.
It would have quite spoilt the romance of the Feudal Castle if it had become a place of common resort, so from the very first the Bolton children bound themselves by a solemn pledge of secrecy not to reveal its existence to anyone. It was in an unfrequented part of the wood, where they themselves never happened to have gone before, and it did not strike them that perhaps other people might have done so.
Unfortunately they could not spend as much time in the Feudal Castle as they would have liked, for lessons began again the very day after it was discovered. In themselves lessons were pleasanter than they had ever been before, for Miss Miller, their new governess, who bicycled over each morning from one of the neighbouring villages, was brighter and more interesting than old-fashioned Miss Rogers. To be sure, Emmeline was at first inclined to resent it as a slight to Miss Rogers when she found herself expected to do by short division sums she had ‘always been taught’ to do by long; but she was a sensible girl on the whole, and when once she had thoroughly mastered the new method, and found out how much quicker and neater it was than the old one, she began to take quite a pride in working her sums by it, and altogether became so docile and well-behaved a pupil that Miss Miller soon shared the general opinion that she was a model child.
To Emmeline’s relief, and possibly also a little to her disappointment, she was not required to depart from the ways in which she had been brought up in any more important respects than that question of short division versus long. So far from amusing herself all Sunday, as Emmeline had a vague impression that fashionable people did, Aunt Grace attended more services than Mary herself had done, and was certainly just as particular with regard to the children’s Sunday observances; indeed, in some ways she was even more so, for instead of being content with a bare repetition of the Catechism, she insisted on seeing that they clearly understood its meaning. And whereas Emmeline had formerly learned merely a verse or two of a hymn, Aunt Grace now expected her to learn the Collect and Gospel for the week, which was a far more serious task. Emmeline could not well grumble at it openly, but at the bottom of her heart she was possibly a little irritated with Aunt Grace for behaving so very differently from what she had pictured.