The Happy Adventurers | Page 3

and lay wakefully thinking of home and Mother, Dick and Jean, and school. The big clock on the mantelpiece seemed to go very, very slowly, its tick loud and deliberate, as though it would say: "Don't think you are going to get off one single minute--sixty minutes to the hour you have to live through, and there are still two hours till tea-time." The rain splashed against the window, the wind moaned through the tree-tops, and the room got steadily darker.
"Oh dear!" Mollie whispered to herself, "what can I do to make the time pass?"
She sat up and looked round, and her eyes fell upon the last of the photograph-albums--the one she had yawned over. She picked it up, propped it on her knees, and, lying back against the cushions, turned the pages over. These were all children, prim children with tidy hair and solemn faces. Mollie stopped at the picture of a girl dressed in a wide-skirted, sprigged-muslin frock. Her hair fell in plump curls from beneath a broad-brimmed hat with long ribbons floating over one shoulder. Her legs were very conspicuous in white stockings and funny boots with tassels dangling on their fronts.
"I expect this is how Ellen Montgomery looked in _The Wide, Wide World_," Mollie said to herself. "She would be rather pretty if she were properly dressed; she looks about my age. I wonder what sort of time she had--horribly dull, probably. No hockey, no Guiding, no fox-trots--I expect she danced the polka, and recited 'Lives of great men all remind us', and got pi-jawed ten times a day. I can't imagine how children endured life in those days. Thank goodness I wasn't born till 1907! She does look rather nice, though--and oh! I wish you could talk, my dear! I am dull."
Just then Aunt Mary began to play the piano in the next room. She played soft, old-fashioned tunes, so that her niece might be soothed to sleep. Mollie did not recognize the tunes but she liked them; they seemed to sympathize with her as she continued to look at the prim little girl in the photograph.
"Perhaps she played those very tunes; she looks as if she practised for one hour a day regularly."
As Mollie lay there, the sweet old music sounding in her ears and her eyes steadily fixed on the face of that other child of long ago, it seemed to her that the child smiled at her.
"I am getting sleepy," she said to herself, and shut her eyes. But she did not feel sleepy and soon opened them again. This time there was no mistake about it--the child in the photograph was smiling, first with her solemn eyes, and then with her prim little mouth. Mollie was so startled that she let the album slip from her lap, and it fell down between the sofa and the wall. She turned round, and, after groping in the narrow space for a minute, she succeeded in getting hold of the album again and pulled it up. As she raised her head and sat up, she saw, standing beside her sofa, as large as life, the prim little girl--wide skirts, white stockings, tasselled boots, and all.
As Mollie stared "with all her eyes" as people say, the little girl smiled at her again, and she noticed that, although the child's dress was so very old-fashioned, her smile was quite a To-day smile, so to speak.
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Mollie, "who are you?"
"I am a Time-traveller," the child answered, speaking in a peculiarly soft voice. "You called me, so I came."
"What on earth is a Time-traveller?" asked Mollie, rather surprised to find that she did not feel in the least alarmed at this sudden apparition.
"A person who travels in Time," the child replied. "I am one, and you are one, but everybody isn't one. I can't explain, so you'd better not waste time asking questions if you want to travel. I can't wait here long."
"But--" said Mollie, looking bewildered, as well she might. "Travel where? Of course I'd love to come, but how can I with a crocked-up ankle; and what would Grannie say?"
"Those things don't matter to Time-travellers," said the other child. "We travel about in Time. You haven't got to think about what is happening here and now--that will be all right. But you have to make a vow before you begin Time-travelling. Do you know what a vow is?"
"Of course I do," Mollie replied; "I'm a Girl Guide."
"I don't know what a Girl Guide is," said the other girl, wrinkling up her pretty forehead, "but a Time-traveller has to vow on her faith and honour never to say one single word about her adventures to any grown-up, either here or there. You must not ask them questions that will make them wonder things, however much