The children blinked. Dickie and Tinkler and the white seal were gone, and only the empty ring of moon-seeds lay on the sand.
*****
"Shocking bathing fatality," the newspapers said. "Lord Arden drowned. The body not yet recovered."
It never was recovered, of course. Elfrida and Edred said nothing. No wonder, their elders said. The shock was too great and too sudden.
The father of Edred and Elfrida is Lord Arden now. He has done all that Dickie would have done. He has made Arden the happiest and most prosperous village in England, and the stream beside which Dickie bade farewell to his cousins flows, a broad moat round the waters of the Castle, restored now to all its own splendour.
There is a tablet in the church which tells of the death by drowning of Richard, Sixteenth Lord Arden. The children read it every Sunday for a year, and knew that it did not tell the truth. But by the time the moon-seeds had grown and flowered and shed their seeds in the Castle garden they ceased to know this, and talked often, sadly and fondly, of dear cousin Dickie who was drowned. And at the same time they ceased to remember that they had ever been out of their own time into the past, so that if they were to read this book
