“Now,” said Ruby, half triumphant and half frightened, in a whisper to Mavis, “now, can you say he’s not a wizard? I think cousin Hortensia was very silly to let us come with him, but it was all you, Mavis, going on about him so. If we’re not turned into toads or lizards before we get home, I—”
“Butterflies would be nicer,” said Mavis, laughing.
“I’ll ask Winfried and his gran to make me into a blue butterfly, and you can be a yellow one if you like.”
She seemed to have caught something of Winfried’s happy confidence, Ruby looked at her in surprise, but it was mixed with anger. What she was going to have said I don’t know, for just then their guide called out again.
“Here we are,” he said, “if you’ll stoop your heads a little;” and looking up, the children saw before them a narrow, low archway, at the entrance to which the steps stopped. Ruby hung back a little, but Mavis ran forward.
“It’s all right, Ruby,” she called back; “and oh, what a pretty garden! Do come quick.”
Ruby followed. It was only necessary to stoop for a moment or two, then she found herself beside her sister, and she could not help joining in her exclamation of pleasure. Somehow or other they had arrived at the back of the cottage, which at this side, they now saw, stood in a pretty and sheltered garden. Perhaps garden is hardly the word to use, for though there were flowers of more than one kind and plants, there were other things one does not often see in a garden. There were ever so many little bowers and grottoes, cleverly put together of different kinds of queerly-shaped and queerly-coloured fragments of rock; there were two or three basins hollowed out of the same stones, in which clear water sparkled, and brilliant seaweed of every shade, from delicate pink to blood-red crimson, glowed; there were shells of strange and wonderful form, and tints as many as those of the rainbow, arranged so that at a little distance they looked like groups of flowers—in short, Ruby was not far wrong when returning to her old idea, she whispered to Mavis, “It’s a mermaid’s garden.”
“And I only hope,” she went on in the same tone, “we shan’t find that somehow or other he has got us down under the sea without our knowing.”
Mavis broke into a merry laugh.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Look up; there’s the good old sun, smiling as usual, with no water between him and us. And see here, Ruby,” and she ran forward, “there are earth flower’s too, as well as sea ones.”