Then fate helped them. The door against their noses opened and Daddy came out, followed by his cousin. All four collided.

'Oh, is the washing-up finished?' asked Monkey innocently, quick as a flash.

'How you startled me!' exclaimed Daddy. 'You really must try to be less impetuous. You'd better ask Mother about the washing,' he repeated, 'she's in there sewing.' His thoughts, it seemed, were just a trifle confused. Plates and linen both meant washing, and sometimes hair and other stuff as well.

'There's no light, you see, yet,' whispered Jimbo. A small lamp usually hung upon the wall. Jane Anne at that moment came out carrying it and asking for a match.

'No starlight, either,' added Monkey quickly, giving her cousin a little nudge. 'It's all upwumbled, or whatever Daddy calls it.'

The look he gave her might well have suppressed a grown-up person-- 'grande personne,' as Jimbo termed it, translating literally--but on Monkey it had only slight effect. Her irrepressible little spirit concealed springs few could regulate. Even avoir-dupois increased their resiliency the moment it was removed. But Jimbo checked her better than most. She did look a trifle ashamed--for a second.

'Can't you wait?' he whispered. 'Daddy'll spoil it if you begin it here. How you do fidget!'

They pa.s.sed all together out into the yard, the men in front, the two children just behind, walking warily.

Then came the separation, yet none could say exactly how it was accomplished. For separations are curious things at the best of times, the forces that effect them as mysterious as wind that blows a pair of b.u.t.terflies across a field. Something equally delicate was at work.

One minute all four stood together by the fountain, and the next Daddy was walking downhill towards the carpenter's house alone, while the other three were already twenty metres up the street that led to the belt of forest.

Jimbo, perhaps, was responsible for the deft manoeuvring. At any rate, he walked beside his big cousin with the air of a successful aide-de- camp. But Monkey, too, seemed flushed with victory, rolling along--her rotundity ever suggested rolling rather than the taking of actual steps--as if she led a prisoner.

'Don't bother your cousin, children,' their father's voice was heard again faintly in the distance. Then the big shoulder of La Citadelle hid him from view and hearing.

And so the sight was seen of these three, arm in arm, pa.s.sing along the village street in the twilight. Gygi saw them go and raised his blue, peaked cap; and so did Henri Favre, standing in the doorway of his little shop, as he weighed the possible value of the new customer for matches, chocolate, and string--the articles English chiefly bought; and likewise Alfred Sandoz, looking a moment through the window of his cabaret, the Guillaume Tell, saw them go past like shadows towards the woods, and observed to his carter friend across the table, 'They choose queer times for expeditions, these English, _ouah!_'

'It's their climate makes them like that,' put in his wife, a touch of pity in her voice. Her daughter swept the Den and lit the _fourneau_ for _la famille anglaise_ in the mornings, and the mother, knowing a little English, spelt out the weather reports in the _Daily Surprise_ she sometimes brought.

Meanwhile the three travellers had crossed the railway line, where Jimbo detained them for a moment's general explanation, and pa.s.sed the shadow of the sentinel poplar. The cl.u.s.ter of spring leaves rustled faintly on its crest. The village lay behind them now. They turned a moment to look back upon the stretch of vines and fields that spread towards the lake. From the pool of shadow where the houses nestled rose the spire of the church, a strong dark line against the fading sunset. Thin columns of smoke tried to draw it after them. Lights already twinkled on the farther sh.o.r.e, five miles across, and beyond these rose dim white forms of the tremendous ghostly Alps. Dusk slowly brought on darkness.

Jimbo began to hum the song of the village he had learned in school--

P't.i.t Bourcelles sur sa colline De partout a gentille mine; On y pratique avec success L'exploitation du francais,

and the moment it was over, his sister burst out with the question that had been buzzing inside her head the whole time--

'How long are you going to stay?' she said, as they climbed higher along the dusty road.

'Oh, about a week,' he told her, giving the answer already used a dozen times. 'I've just come out for a holiday--first holiday I've had for twenty years. Fancy that! Pretty long time, eh?'

They simply didn't believe that; they let it pa.s.s--politely.

'London's stuffy, you know, just now,' he added, aware that he was convicted of exaggeration. 'Besides, it's spring.'

'There are millions of flowers here,' Jimbo covered his mistake kindly, 'millions and millions. Aren't there, Monkey?'

'Oh, billions.'

'Of course,' he agreed.

'And more than anywhere else in the whole world.'

'It looks like that,' said Cousin Henry, as proudly as they said it themselves. And they told him how they picked clothes-baskets full of the wild lily of the valley that grew upon the Boudry slopes, hepaticas, periwinkles, jonquils, blue and white violets, as well as countless anemones, and later, the big yellow marguerites.

'Then how long are you going to stay--_really_?' inquired Monkey once again, as though the polite interlude were over. It was a delicate way of suggesting that he had told an untruth. She looked up straight into his face. And, meeting her big brown eyes, he wondered a little--for the first time--how he should reply.

'Daddy came here meaning to stay only six months--first.'

'When I was littler,' Jimbo put in.

'----and stayed here all this time--four years.'

'I hope to stay a week or so--just a little holiday, you know,' he said at length, giving the answer purposely. But he said it without conviction, haltingly. He felt that they divined the doubt in him.

They guessed his thought along the hands upon his arm, as a horse finds out its rider from the touch upon the reins. On either side big eyes watched and judged him; but the brown ones put a positive enchantment in his blood. They shone so wonderfully in the dusk.

'Longer than that, I think,' she told him, her own mind quite made up.

'It's not so easy to get away from.'

'You mean it?' he asked seriously. 'It makes one quite nervous.'

'There's such a lot to do here,' she said, still keeping her eyes fixed upon his face till he felt the wonder in him become a little unmanageable. 'You'll never get finished in a week.'

'My secretary,' he stammered, 'will help me,' and Jimbo nodded, fastening both hands upon his arm, while Monkey indulged in a little gust of curious laughter, as who should say 'He who laughs last, laughs best.'

They entered the edge of the forest. Hepaticas watched them with their eyes of blue. Violets marked their tread. The frontiers of the daylight softly closed behind them. A thousand trees opened a way to let them pa.s.s, and moss twelve inches thick took their footsteps silently as birds. They came presently to a little clearing where the pines stood in a circle and let in a s.p.a.ce of sky. Looking up, all three saw the first small stars in it. A wild faint scent of coming rain was in the air--those warm spring rains that wash the way for summer. And a signal flashed unseen from the blue eyes to the brown.

'This way,' said Jimbo firmly. 'There's an armchair rock where you can rest and get your wind a bit,' and, though Rogers had not lost his wind, he let himself be led, and took the great grey boulder for his chair. Instantly, before he had arranged his weight among the points and angles, both his knees were occupied.

'By Jove,' flashed through his mind. 'They've brought me here on purpose. I'm caught!'

A tiny pause followed.

'Now, look here, you little Schemers, I want to know what----'

But the sentence was never finished. The hand of Monkey was already pointing upwards to the s.p.a.ce of sky. He saw the fringe of pine tops fencing it about with their feathery, crested ring, and in the centre shone faint, scattered stars. Over the fence of mystery that surrounds common objects wonder peeped with one eye like a star.

'Cousinenry,' he heard close to his ear, so soft it almost might have been those tree-tops whispering to the night, 'do you know anything about a Star Cave--a place where the starlight goes when there are no eyes or puddles about to catch it?'

A Star Cave! How odd! His own boyhood's idea. He must have mentioned it to his cousin perhaps, and _he_ had told the children. And all that was in him of nonsense, poetry, love rose at a bound as he heard it.

He felt them settle themselves more comfortably upon his knees. He forgot to think about the points and angles. Here surely a gateway was opening before his very feet, a gateway into that world of fairyland the old clergyman had spoken about. A great wave of tenderness swept him--a flood strong and deep, as he had felt it long ago upon the hill of that Kentish village. The golden boyhood's mood rushed over him once more with all its original splendour. It took a slightly different form, however. He knew better how to direct it for one thing. He pressed the children closer to his side.

'A what?' he asked, speaking low as they did. 'Do I know a what?'

'A cave where lost starlight collects,' Monkey repeated, 'a Star Cave.'

And Jimbo said aloud the verses he had already learned by heart. While his small voice gave the words, more than a little mixed, a bird high up among the boughs woke from its beauty sleep and sang. The two sounds mingled. But the singing of the bird brought back the scenery of the Vicarage garden, and with it the strange, pa.s.sionate things the old clergyman had said. The two scenes met in his mind, pa.s.sed in and out of one another like rings of smoke, interchanged, and finally formed a new picture all their own, where flowers danced upon a carpet of star-dust that glittered in mid-air.

He knew some sudden, deep enchantment of the spirit. The Fairyland the world had lost spread all about him, and--he had the children close.

The imaginative faculty that for years had invented ingenious patents, woke in force, and ran headlong down far sweeter channels--channels that fastened mind, heart, and soul together in a single intricate network of soft belief. He remembered the dusk upon the Crayfield lawns.