A few minutes more, and they were safely packed into a carriage which drove them back to Ravensnest, and Aunt Emma was saying good-bye to them.

“Next time, I shall come and see you, Milly,” she said, as she kissed Milly’s little sleepy face.  “Don’t forget me till then.”

“Then you’ll tell us about old Mother Quiverquake,” said Olly, hugging her with his small arms.  “Aunt Emma, I haven’t given Johnny back his stockings.  They did tickle me so in the boat.”

“We’ll get them some time,” said Aunt Emma.  “Good-night, good-night.”

It was a sleepy pair of children that nurse lifted out of the carriage at Ravensnest.  And though they tried to tell her something about it, she had to wait till next morning before she could really understand anything about their wonderful day at Aunt Emma’s house.

CHAPTER VI

WET DAYS AT RAVENSNEST

For about a week after the row on the lake the weather was lovely, and Milly wondered more than ever what the old gentleman who warned them of the rain in the mountains could have been thinking about.  She and Olly were out all day, and nearly every afternoon nurse lifted the tea-table through the low nursery window on to the lawn, and let them have their tea out of doors among the flowers and trees and twittering birds.  They had found out a fly-catcher’s nest in the ivy above the front door, and every evening the two children used to fetch out their father to watch the parent birds catching flies and carrying them to the hungry little ones, whom they could just hear chirping up above the ivy.  Olly was wild to get the gardener’s ladder that he might climb up and look into the nest, but Mr. Norton would not have it lest it should frighten away the old birds.

One delicious warm morning, too, the children had their long-promised bathe, and what fun it was.  Nurse woke them up at five o’clock in the morning—­fancy waking up as early as that!—­and they slipped on their little blue bathing gowns, and their sand shoes that mother had bought them in Cromer the year before, and then nurse wrapped them up in shawls, and she and they and father went down and opened the front door while everybody else in the house was asleep, and slipped out.  What a quiet strange world it seemed, the grass and the flowers dripping with dew, and overhead such a blue sky with white clouds sailing slowly about in it.

“Why don’t we always get up at five o’clock, father?” asked Olly, as he and Milly skipped along—­such an odd little pair of figures—­beside Mr. Norton.  “Isn’t it nice and funny?”

“Very,” said Mr. Norton.  “Still, I imagine Olly, if you had to get up every day at five o’clock, you might think it funny, but I’m sure you wouldn’t always think it nice.”

“Oh!  I’m sure we should,” said Milly, seriously.  “Why, father, it’s just as if everything was ours and nobody else’s, the garden and the river I mean.  Is there anybody up yet do you think—­in those houses?” And Milly pointed to the few houses they could see from the Ravensnest garden.