Margaret sighed. "All right, Peter, I just wondered. I would have liked you to come. It would have been fun, because my brother's in the Army now, and it's pretty gloomy at home... I don't have many adventures in the hols. Do you? I believe you once said you'd had the biggest adventure last summer of anyone in the school. Did you? I wish you'd tell me now. Nobody will be able to get to sleep for hours yet. What happened, Peter? Was it a romance?"

Peter laughed.

"No, it wasn't. Nothing like it. But if I tell you, you must swear never to repeat it, because we all had to promise at the time. Do you swear, Margaret?"

Margaret swore, and then sat entranced, sipping water from the tooth-glass while Peter told her the story of last summer's adventure.

"Where I live," she began, "it's so lonely that sometimes we don't often see anybody for days except the old postman. On our side of the Long Mynd Mountain there are several valleys, but on the Welsh side there are thick woods, and very few paths or roads. The next valley to ours is called Dark Hollow, and that's very lonely, and the next is the Witchend Valley with a lovely old farmhouse of the same name, and another farm called Ingles, after the man who works it. Last summer the nicest people I've ever met came to live at Witchend. Their name is Morton. Their father was in the R.A.F., and that left Mrs. Morton, their mother, who is a darling, David, my special friend, and the twins, Dickie and Mary. David is fifteen, like me, and the twins are nine. You can't imagine anything like these two. They're awfully alike, of course, but they are a super couple because they always stick up for each other, always do everything together and often seem to know exactly what the other is thinking without either of them saying a word.

"When I first saw them, they had all got lost on the hills above Dark Hollow, and Dickie had fallen in a bog. I remember Mary being furious with me because I said that her twin smelled when we'd fished him out! Anyway they came home with me and later we all explored the mountain, and for a little while we trailed a strange man with a knapsack. The twins were full of legends about the Stiperstones - where I'm going tomorrow - told them by a sailor they'd met on the train, and we wasted a lot of time before deciding to climb down the west side of the mountain, through a wood, to find a farm called Appledore.