Rupert climbed stiffly to the ground and heard the welcome of the
friend whom he was to know thereafter as Mrs. Brent. Her voice and
presence were rich with reassurance: she was fat and hearty, and the
threatening earth had spared her, so he took comfort. The laurels by the
small iron gate rattled at him as he passed, but Mrs. Brent had each boy
by a hand, and no one could be afraid. It was, he remembered, impossible
for the three to go through the gate abreast.

"Run in now," said Mrs. Brent, and when he had obeyed he heard a tall
grandfather clock ticking in the hall. He could see a staircase running
upwards into shadows, and the half-opened doors made him think of the
mouths of monsters. It seemed a long time before Mrs. Brent followed him
and made a cheerful noise.

With these memories he could always keep the little girls entranced,
even when great adventures of their own came to them on the moor, for
Notya was a stepmother by her own avowal, and in fairy tales a
stepmother was always cruel. They pretended to believe that she had
carried them away by force, that some day they would be rescued and
taken back to the big white nursery and the fluffy white mat; but Helen
at last spoilt the game by asserting that she did not want to be rescued
and by refusing to allow Notya to be the villain of the piece.

"She isn't cruel. She's sad," Helen explained.

"Yes, really; but this is pretending," Rupert said.

"It's not pretending. It's true," Miriam said, and she went on with the
game though she had to play alone. At the age of twenty she still played
it: Notya was still the cruel stepmother and Miriam's eyes were eager on
a horizon against which the rescuer should stand. At one time he had
been splendid and invincible, a knight to save her, and if his place had
now been taken by the unknown Uncle Alfred, it was only that realism
had influenced her fiction, and with a due sense of economy she used the
materials within her reach.

Domestic being though Helen was, the white nursery had no attraction for
her: she was more than satisfied with her many-coloured one; its floor
had hills and tiny dales, pools and streams, and it was walled by
greater hills and roofed by sky. On it there grew thorn-bushes which
thrust out thin hands, begging for food, in winter, and which wore a
lady's lovely dress in summertime and a warm red coat for autumn nights.
There was bracken, like little walking-sticks in spring, and when the
leav