No, mister, thanking you kindly, if you can't bring a
clergyman into the dream I'll live and die like what I am.'
'Will you marry her if we get a clergyman?' asked the match-making
Anthea.
'I'm agreeable, miss, I m sure,' said he, pulling his wreath
straight. ''Ow this 'ere bokay do tiddle a chap's ears to be
sure!'
So, very hurriedly, the carpet was spread out, and instructed to
fetch a clergyman. The instructions were written on the inside of
Cyril's cap with a piece of billiard chalk Robert had got from the
marker at the hotel at Lyndhurst. The carpet disappeared, and more
quickly than you would have thought possible it came back, bearing
on its bosom the Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop.
The Reverend Septimus was rather a nice young man, but very much
mazed and muddled, because when he saw a strange carpet laid out at
his feet, in his own study, he naturally walked on it to examine it
more closely. And he happened to stand on one of the thin places
that Jane and Anthea had darned, so that he was half on wishing
carpet and half on plain Scotch heather-mixture fingering, which
has no magic properties at all.
The effect of this was that he was only half there--so that the
children could just see through him, as though he had been a ghost.
And as for him, he saw the sunny southern shore, the cook and the
burglar and the children quite plainly; but through them all he
saw, quite plainly also, his study at home, with the books and the
pictures and the marble clock that had been presented to him when
he left his last situation.
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