To Uncle Felix, at any rate, it seemed a fact--this joyous
sensation of immense duration, yet of nothing passing away: the bliss
of utter freedom. He gasped to realise it. But the children did not
gasp. They had always known that nothing ever really came to an end.
"The weather's still here," he heard Judy calling across the lawn to
Tim--as though she had just been looking among December snowdrifts and
had popped back again into the fragrance of midsummer hayfields. "The
Equator's made of golden butterflies, all shining," the boy called
back, having evidently just been round the world and seen its gleaming
waist....
But none of them had found what they were looking for....
They had looked in all the difficult places where a clever player
would be most likely to conceal himself, yet in vain; there was no
definite sign of him, no footprints on the flower-beds or along the
edge of the shrubberies. The garden proper had been searched from end
to end without result. The children had been to the particular hiding-
places each knew best, Tim to the dirty nook between the ilex and the
larder window, and Judy to the scooped-out trunk of the rotten elm,
and both together to the somewhat smelly channel between the yew trees
and a disused outhouse--all equally untenanted.
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