Mabel wished it had been a dark
night, and then corrected the wish with a hasty shudder.
Gerald, submitting to a searching interrogatory from the tall-hatted
Ugly-Wugly as to his schools, his sports, pastimes, and ambitions,
wondered how long the spell would last. The ring seemed to work
in sevens. Would these things have seven hours'life or fourteen or
twenty-one?"His mind lost itself in the intricacies of the
seven-times table (a teaser at the best of times) and only found
itself with a shock when the procession found itself at the gates of
the Castle grounds.
Locked of course.
"You see," he explained, as the Ugly-Wuglies vainly shook the
iron gates with incredible hands; "it's so very late. There is another
way. But you have to climb through a hole."
"The ladies," the respectable Ugly-Wugly began objecting; but the
ladies with one voice affirmed that they loved adventures. "So
frightfully thrilling," added the one who wore roses.
So they went round by the road, and coming to the hole it was a
little difficult to find in the moonlight, which always disguises the
most familiar things Gerald went first with the bicycle lantern
which he had snatched as his pilgrims came out of the yard; the
shrinking Mabel followed, and then the Ugly-Wuglies, with hollow
rattlings of their wooden limbs against the stone, crept through,
and with strange vowel-sounds of general amazement, manly
courage, and feminine nervousness, followed the light along the
passage through the fern-hung cutting and under the arch.
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