When the nurse came in he gave his orders.

“I want my chair,” he said.  “Miss Mary and I are going to look at the part of the house which is not used.  John can push me as far as the picture-gallery because there are some stairs.  Then he must go away and leave us alone until I send for him again.”

Rainy days lost their terrors that morning.  When the footman had wheeled the chair into the picture-gallery and left the two together in obedience to orders, Colin and Mary looked at each other delighted.  As soon as Mary had made sure that John was really on his way back to his own quarters below stairs, Colin got out of his chair.

“I am going to run from one end of the gallery to the other,” he said, “and then I am going to jump and then we will do Bob Haworth’s exercises.”

And they did all these things and many others.  They looked at the portraits and found the plain little girl dressed in green brocade and holding the parrot on her finger.

“All these,” said Colin, “must be my relations.  They lived a long time ago.  That parrot one, I believe, is one of my great, great, great, great aunts.  She looks rather like you, Mary—­not as you look now but as you looked when you came here.  Now you are a great deal fatter and better looking.”

“So are you,” said Mary, and they both laughed.

They went to the Indian room and amused themselves with the ivory elephants.  They found the rose-colored brocade boudoir and the hole in the cushion the mouse had left but the mice had grown up and run away and the hole was empty.  They saw more rooms and made more discoveries than Mary had made on her first pilgrimage.  They found new corridors and corners and flights of steps and new old pictures they liked and weird old things they did not know the use of.  It was a curiously entertaining morning and the feeling of wandering about in the same house with other people but at the same time feeling as if one were miles away from them was a fascinating thing.

“I’m glad we came,” Colin said.  “I never knew I lived in such a big queer old place.  I like it.  We will ramble about every rainy day.  We shall always be finding new queer corners and things.”

That morning they had found among other things such good appetites that when they returned to Colin’s room it was not possible to send the luncheon away untouched.

When the nurse carried the tray down-stairs she slapped it down on the kitchen dresser so that Mrs. Loomis, the cook, could see the highly polished dishes and plates.

“Look at that!” she said.  “This is a house of mystery, and those two children are the greatest mysteries in it.”

“If they keep that up every day,” said the strong young footman John, “there’d be small wonder that he weighs twice as much to-day as he did a month ago.  I should have to give up my place in time, for fear of doing my muscles an injury.”