He had not to wait long for some explanation of the vision. At breakfast (and it was a wonderful breakfast, with more eggs and bacon, cream and strawberry jam than he had ever known) his father said:

“Now, children, there’s one thing here that you must remember. Jeremy, are you listening?”

“Yes, father.”

“Don’t speak with your mouth full. There’s a farm near the church on the sand. You can’t mistake it.”

“Is the farm on the sand, father?” asked Mary, her eyes wide open.

“No, of course not. How could a farm be on the sand? The farm-house stands back at the end of the path that runs by the church. It’s a grey farm with a high stone wall. You can’t mistake it. Well, none of you children are to go near that farm—on no account whatever, on no account whatever, to go near it.”

“Why not, father?” asked Jeremy. “Is there scarlet fever there?”

“Because I say so is quite enough,” said Mr. Cole. “There’s a family staying there you must have nothing at all to do with. Perhaps you will see them in the distance. You must avoid them and never speak to them.”

“Are they very wicked?” asked Mary, her voice vibrating low with the drama of the situation.

“Never mind what they are. They are not fit companions for you children. It is most unfortunate that they are here so close to us. Had I known it I would not, I think, have come here.”

Jeremy said nothing; these were, of course, his friends of the morning. He could see now straight across the breakfast-table those eight burning, staring eyes.

Later, from the slope of the green hill above the rectory, he looked across the gleaming beach at the church, the road, and then, in the distance, the forbidden farm. Strange how the forbidding of anything made one from the very bottom of one’s soul long for it! Yesterday, staring across the green slopes and hollows, the farm would have been but a grey patch sewn into the purple hill that hung behind it.

Now it was mysterious, crammed with hidden life of its own, the most dramatic point in the whole landscape. What had they done, that family that was so terrible? What was there about those four boys that he had never seen in any boys before? He longed to know them with a burning, desperate longing. Nevertheless a whole week passed without any contact.

Once Jeremy saw, against the sky-line on the hill behind the church, a trail of four, single file, silhouetted black. They passed steadily, secretly, bent on their own mysterious purposes. The sky, when their figures had left it, was painted with drama.

Once Mary reported that, wandering along the beach, a wild figure, almost naked, had started from behind a rock and shouted at her. She ran, of course, and behind her there echoed a dreadful laugh. But the best story of all was from Helen, who, passing the graveyard, had seen go down the road a most beautiful lady, most beautifully dressed. According to Helen, she was the most lovely lady ever seen, with jewels hanging from her ears, pearls round her neck, and her clothes a bright orange. She had walked up the road and gone through the gate into the farm.

The mystery would have excited them all even more than, in fact, it did had Caerlyon itself been less entrancing. But what Caerlyon turned out to be no words can describe! Those were the days, of course, before golf-links in Glebeshire, and although no one who has ever played on the Caerlyon links will ever wish them away (they, the handsomest, kindest, most fantastic sea links in all England), yet I will not pretend that those same green slopes, sliding so softly down to the sea-shore, bending back so gently to the wild mysteries of the Poonderry Moor, had not then a virgin charm that now they have lost! Who can decide?

But, for children thirty years ago, what a kingdom! Glittering with colour, they had the softness of a loving mother, the sudden, tumbled romance of an adventurous elder brother; they caught all the colours of the floating sky in their laps and the shadows flew like birds from shoulder to shoulder, and then suddenly the hills would shake their sides, and all those shadows would slide down to the yellow beach and lie there like purple carpets. You could race and race and never grow tired, lie on your back and stare into the fathomless sky, roll over for ever and come to no harm, wander and never be lost. The first gate of the kingdom and the last—the little golden square underneath the tower where the green witch has her stall of treasures that she never sells....