He, Margery, and David were standing in a row opposite the coffin-shaped box. Just then the cistern in the room behind gave one of its best goblin-groans, and Maddox looked awfully round.
“Oh, what’s that?” he said. “That’s not the cistern. That’s a man bleeding to death in there, that is. His throat’s cut from ear to ear.”
“No,” said David. “I’m sure it was the cistern.”
“Are you? It may have been the cistern before, but I don’t believe it was that time. Pity it’s not a little darker. There’s too much light really just now.”
Already to David the attic bristled again with entrancing possibilities, under this stimulus. It was queer that any one of Maddox’s age and attainments should see sport in what a few hours ago had seemed childish and savourless to himself, but since this was so, it was clear there must be something in it. But school-boy hero-worship made him see through his hero’s eyes, and all that Maddox did or said was invested with authority. True, he had seen him perhaps half a dozen times altogether, but that was quite sufficient to make this matchless glamour. In all the world there was no one so instinct with romance and glory as this boy three years his senior who realised for him all he wanted to be.
Of course they went downstairs again on the pronouncement that it was not dark enough.
“I’m afraid you’ll think the garden is rot,” said David. “There’s a beastly mulberry-tree bang in the middle of the lawn. But it’s not so bad to have tea in: Margery, can’t we have tea out there?”
So the Fairy Prince was escorted downstairs and out into the garden, to give his verdict on that despised spot, and looked round with those quick movements of his eye from side to side without turning his head, which again seemed now the only possible way of looking at things.
“But what on earth _is_ good enough for you, David?” he said. “You can’t read Keats except out of a second edition, and you told me the attics were rather fun once, and you say the garden is rotten! Look at those brick walls, look at the house, look at the mulberry-tree! Oh, I say, what are those stones in the corner? Isn’t that a Roman altar?”
“Yes, I believe so,” said David. “Do you care about those things?”