"I put a few bulbs down years ago, and they've spread. They will if you never touch them. Shall we go on now? Mother'll have some tea ready for you, I expect. The Doctor generally gets his at the Sanatorium. I promised to make up some medicines for him, so I must hurry back." The girls followed, considerably mystified. Bevis's connection with Grimbal's Farm was a puzzle. He left them in the stackyard and plunged into one of the barns, and later on they caught a glimpse of his dark, curly head through the door of the dispensary. They did not see him again before they left. Mrs. Penruddock, kind but too busy for conversation, brought the tray into the parlour and left them to have their tea, and they had scarcely finished eating saffron-cake and hard-bake when Dr. Tremayne arrived, in a violent hurry to get back to Durracombe. So they scrambled into their coats and wraps, picked up their bunches of snowdrops, and took their seats in the car, and next moment they were off up the steep hill that led out of the ravine. Before they whirled round the corner they turned their heads for one last peep at Chagmouth. The little town lay huddled in twilight, and the sea behind was dim as the sky, but the brook purred joyously on its pebbly course among the gardens, and the faint scent of burning driftwood was wafted up from below. "This day's going to be specially marked in my diary," murmured Merle. "It's been a day of days." "I feel somehow as if it were the beginning of something else," answered Mavis. "Uncle David, you'll bring us here again, won't you?" "Any Saturday that's fine." "Then I shall simply live for fine Saturdays and Chagmouth. It's the loveliest place I've ever seen. I don't believe there's anything else like it in the whole of the wide world, or anywhere else out of Paradise. That's how I feel about it!" CHAPTER VI A Child of Misfortune Mavis and Merle were brimming over with curiosity about Bevis and about several other affairs in Chagmouth, but they had to keep their questions to themselves, for Dr. Tremayne considered that narrow Devon roads in the gathering darkness required his whole attention, and that conversation might mean an accident. "You're requested not to speak to the man at the wheel," he replied, in answer to Merle's first eager inquiry; "it takes me all my time to drive." So the girls subsided into quiet, and did not even speak to one another, but sat watching the glare of the headlights on the road and the dark outlines of the high hedges and banks above. They made up for their silence, though, after supper, for they found Jessop in the pantry, and, offering to wipe the silver for her as an excuse for their presence, they began a brisk catechism. Jessop was a kindly old gossip, a native of Chagmouth, and had all the affairs of the little town at her fingers' ends. She was nothing loath to discuss its inhabitants while she washed up the supper things.