Mary Elizabeth and I took hold of hands and ran. We scrambled up the steps and escaped to the sultry welcome of bright day. Out there everything was as before. Little Harold was crossing the lawn carrying a flower-pot of water which was running steadily from the hole in the bottom. With the maternal importance of little girls, we got the jar from him and undertook to bring him more water. And when he led us to the source of supply, this was a faucet in the side of the house just beyond a narrow, dusty, cellar window. When he turned the faucet, we were, so to speak, face to face with that R-s-t-t-t-t-t.
Mary Elizabeth and I looked at each other and looked away. Then we looked back and braved it through.
“Anyway,” she said, “we were afraid of a truly thing, and not of a pretend thing.”
There seemed to us, I recall, a certain loyalty in this as to a creed.
Already Delia had returned from the library. The authorities refused the ink. One might come in there and write with it, but one must not take it from the table. Calista arrived from the dining-room. A waiting-woman to the queen, she reported, was engaged in dusting the sideboard and she herself had advanced no farther than the pantry door. It remained only for Margaret Amelia and Betty to come from their farther quest bearing a green handbill which they thought might take the place of Calista’s quarry if she returned empty-handed; but we were no nearer than before to blue and orange materials, or to any other.
We took counsel and came to a certain ancient conclusion that in union there is strength. We must, we thought we saw, act the aggressor. We moved on the stronghold together. Armed with a spoon and two bottles, we found a keeper of properties within who spooned us out the necessary ink; tea was promised to take the place of coffee if we would keep out of the house and not bother anybody any more, indefinitely; shoe-polish was conceded in a limited quantity, briefly, and under inspection; and we all descended into Aladdin’s cave and easily found baskets to which red mosquito-netting was clinging in sufficient measure. Then we sat in the shade of the side lawn and proceeded to colour many waters.
It was a delicate task to cloud the clear liquid to this tint and that, to watch it change expression under our hands, pale, deepen, vary to our touch; in its heart to set jewels and to light fires. We worked with deep deliberation, testing by old standards of taste set up by at least two or three previous experiences, consulting one another’s soberest judgment, occasionally inventing a new liquid. I remember that it was on that day that we first thought of bluing. Common washing bluing, the one substance really intended for colouring water, had so far escaped our notice.
“Somebody,” observed Margaret Amelia, as we worked, “ought to keep keeping a look-out to see if they’re coming back.”
Delia, who was our man of action, ran to the clothes-reel, which stood on the highest land of the castle grounds, and looked away over the valley.
“There’s a cloud of dust on the horizon,” she reported, “but I think it’s Mr. Wells getting home from Caledonia.”