It had become more exciting still since Esther discovered the cellar.

Esther Costello was ten, and the eldest of the four; the others followed her, though she was only a girl, because she knew the best games, and was daring always, and strong enough to punch their heads if need be. There was also (though they did not know this, and would have spat derisively if they had been told) an element of great beauty in her small, lively face. But to look at them otherwise, there was nothing much to choose between the four children: they were all ragged, barefoot, ill-nourished; the outdoor air had put a deceptive brown upon their faces, not really hiding the pallid skins below.

Their hair, which never knew a comb from one month’s end to another, hung matted and over-long; their hands and feet alike were filthy. The boys wore bleached khaki shorts, Esther a faded skirt and a ravelled woollen jersey. The quartet, in fact, looked what they were – the products of a poor Irish village, and of feckless parents who, lacking the resources or the patience to train their families, thankfully let them run wild.

The children were thus, as free young animals, singularly happy for most of the time, and especially so on this May morning, when Esther – newly-elected Captain of the Cellar – was allowing them for the first time to see what she had found below the flagged-stone floor.

The cellar itself was wonderful enough: a single dark space, hollowed out beneath the living room, and unsuspected by the two generations of children who had always used the deserted cottage as a playground. Its entrance was by a trapdoor beside the fireplace, masked by a stack of crumbling peats and discovered by Esther when she was scavenging for kindling. A ladder led down to it, and there, by candlelight, she had come upon an empty room, stone-flagged, swept clean, which must have lain hidden in musty darkness for at least twenty years.

The cellar had become their headquarters for the most secret meetings of all. But a few weeks later they had found something else, something better still. Hidden treasure, no less – or so it seemed likely to turn out.

It was, once more and inevitably, Esther who had chanced to stamp on a hollow flagstone, and become curious, and, when her brother and the others were gone, prised it up and discovered the strange hoard below. Four boxes they were, wrapped tight in old newspapers, and round them all a big, rotted mackintosh sheet.

And in the boxes?

“I’m not saying,” said Esther, when she first reported the find to an awed audience.

“You’ve never looked,” said Michael Fairlie.

That was not quite true. Esther had looked at one box, and been puzzled by what she saw, and put back the top staves again, without exploring farther.

“I’ve looked all right. Never you fear.”

“Is it treasure?” asked Denis Finane, a small wizened caricature of a child who looked almost a decade older than his nine years. “Is it gold, then?”