Wherewith there was a halt.  Miss Elbury insisted that Phyllis should ride, the banks began to show promise of flowers, and, in the search for violets, dangerous topics were forgotten, and Wilfred was forgiven.  They reached the spot marked by Fly, a field with a border of sloping broken ground and brushwood, which certainly fulfilled all their desires, steeply descending to a stream full of rocks, the ground white with wood anemones, long evergreen trails of periwinkles and blue flowers between, primroses clustering under the roots of the trees, daffodils gilding the grass above, and the banks verdant with exquisite feather-moss.  Such a springtide wood was joy to all, especially as the first cuckoo of the season came to add to their delights and set them counting for the augury of happy years, which proved so many that Mysie said they would not know what to do with them.

‘I should,’ said Ivinghoe.  ’I should like to live to be a great old statesman, as Lord Palmerston did, and have it all my own way.  Wouldn’t I bring things round again!’

‘Perhaps they would have gone too far,’ suggested Jasper, ’and then you would have to gnaw your hand like Giant Pope, as Wilfred says.’

‘Catch me, while I could do something better.’

‘If one only lived long enough,’ speculated Fergus, ’one might find out what everything was made of, and how to do everything.’

’I wonder if the people did before the Flood, when they lived eight or nine hundred years,’ said Fly.

‘Perhaps that is the reason there is nothing new under the sun,’ suggested Valetta, as many a child has before suggested.

‘But then,’ said Mysie, they got wicked.’

‘And then after the Flood it had all to be begun over again,’ said Ivinghoe.  ’Let me see, Methuselah lived about as long as from William the Conqueror till now.  I think he might have got to steam and electricity.’

‘And dynamite,’ said Gillian.  ’Oh, I don’t wonder they had to be swept away, if they were clever and wicked both!’

‘And I suppose they were,’ said Jasper.  ’At least the giants, and that they handed on some of their ability through Ham, to the Egyptians, and all those queer primeval coons, whose works we are digging up.’

‘From the Conquest till now,’ repeated Gillian.  ’I’m glad we don’t live so long now.  It tires one to think of it.’

‘But we shall,’ said Fly.

‘Yes,’ said Mysie, ’but then we shall be rid of this nasty old self that is always getting wrong.’

‘That little lady’s nasty old self does so as little as any one’s,’ Jasper could not help remarking to his sister; and Fly, pouncing on the first purple orchis spike amid its black-spotted leaves, cried—–­

’At any rate, these dear things go on the same, without any tiresome inventing.’

‘Except God’s just at first,’ whispered Mysie.

‘And the gardeners do invent new ones,’ said Valetta.