‘They clipped them!  Then did this place belong to our ancestors?’

‘Poetic grandmother, really!’ said Mysie.

‘Great grandmother,’ corrected Ivinghoe.  ’To be sure.  It was from the Clipps that we got all this Rockstone estate!’

’And I suppose this was their house?  What a shame to have deserted it!’

‘Oh, it has been a farmhouse,’ said Fly.  ’I heard something about farms that wouldn’t let.’

‘Then is it yours?’ cried Valetta, ‘and may we gather the flowers?’

‘And mayn’t we explore?’ asked Mysie.  ‘Oh, what fun!’

‘Holloa!’ exclaimed Wilfred, transfixed, as if he had seen the ghosts of all the Clipps.  For just as Valetta and Mysie threw themselves on the big bunches of hepatica and the white narcissus, a roar, worthy of the clip-tailed lions, proceeded from the window, and the demand, ‘Who is picking my roses?’

Primrose in terror threw herself on Gillian with a little scream.  Wilfred crept behind the walls, but after the general start there was an equally universal laugh, for between the stout mullions of the oriel window Lord Rotherwood’s face was seen, and Sir Jasper’s behind him.

Great was the jubilation, and there was a rush to the tall door, up the dilapidated steps, where curls of fern were peeping out; but the gentlemen called out that only the back-door could be opened, and the intention of a ‘real grand exploration’ was cut short by Miss Elbury’s declaring that she was bound not to let Phyllis stay out till six o’clock.

Fly, in her usual good-humoured way, suppressed her sighs and begged the others to explore without her, but the general vote declared this to be out of the question.  Fly had too short a time to remain with her cousins to be forsaken even for the charms of ’the halls of Ivor,’ or the rival Beast’s Castle, as Gillian called it, which, after all, would not run away.

‘But it might be let,’ said Mysie.

‘Yes, I’ve got a tenant in agitation,’ said Lord Rotherwood mischievously.  ’Never mind, I dare say he won’t inquire what you have done with his butter and eggs.’

So with a parting salute to the ancestral halls, the cavalry was set in order, big panniers full of moss and flowers disposed on the donkeys, Fly placed on her pony, and every maiden taking her basket of flowers, Jasper and Ivinghoe alone being amiable, or perhaps trustworthy enough to assist in carrying.  Fly’s pony demurred to the extra burthen, so Jasper took hers; and when Gillian declared herself too fond of her flowers to part with them, Ivinghoe astonished Miss Vincent, on whom some stones of Fergus’s, as well as her own share of flowers, had been bestowed, by taking one handle of her most cumbrous basket.

Sir Jasper and Lord Rotherwood rode together through the happy young troop on the homeward way.  Perhaps Ivinghoe was conscious of a special nod of approval from his father.