The Happy Adventurers | Page 3

said Grannie, "now I'll tuck you up and lower the blinds,
and you'll have a nice little nap till tea-time."
Mollie closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come.
She missed her morning walk and the fresh air of out-of-doors, so she
gave it up, opened her eyes again, 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