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Mo laughed and led Meggie across the road. "Elinor is very proud of this gate. She had it specially made. It's copied from a picture in a book."
    "A picture of the Selfish Giant's garden?" murmured Meggie, peering through the intricately twining iron bars.
    "The Selfish Giant?" Mo laughed. "No, I think it was another story. Although that one would suit Elinor pretty well."
    Tall hedges grew on both sides of the gate, their thorny branches hiding any view of what lay beyond. But even through the iron bars Meggie could see nothing promising except for tall rhododendron bushes and a broad gravel drive that soon disappeared between them.
    "Looks like you have rich relations," Dustfinger whispered in her ear.
    21

    "Yes, Elinor is quite rich," said Mo, drawing Meggie away from the gate. "But she'll probably end up poor as a church mouse because she spends so much money on books. I think she'd sell her soul to the devil without thinking twice if he offered her the right book for it." He pushed the heavy gate open with a single movement.
    "What are you doing?" asked Meggie in alarm. "We can't just drive in." For there was a sign beside the door, still clearly legible even if some of the letters were partly hidden by the leaves of the hedge:
    PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
    Meggie didn't think it sounded very inviting.
    Mo, however, only laughed. "Don't worry," he said, opening the gate wider. "The only thing Elinor guards with a burglar alarm is her library. She couldn't care less who walks through this gate. She's not what you'd call a nervous woman, and she doesn't have many visitors anyway."
    "What about dogs?" Dustfinger peered anxiously into the strange garden. "That gate suggests at least three ferocious dogs to me. Big ones, the size of calves."
    But Mo just shook his head. "Elinor hates dogs," he said, going back to the van. "OK, get in."
    Elinor's grounds were more like a wood than a garden. Once they were through the gateway the drive curved, as if taking a deep breath before going on up the slope, then lost itself among dark firs and chestnut trees, which grew so close together their branches made a tunnel. Meggie was just thinking it would never end when the trees suddenly receded, and the drive brought them to an open space covered with gravel and surrounded by carefully tended rose beds.
    A gray station wagon stood on the gravel in front of a house that was bigger than the school Meggie had been attending for the last year. She tried to count the windows, but soon gave up. It was a very beautiful house but looked just as uninviting as the iron gate. Perhaps it was only the evening twilight that made the ochre yellow of the plaster look so dirty. And perhaps the green shutters were closed only because night was already falling over the surrounding mountains.
    Perhaps. But Meggie would have bet her last book they were seldom open even in the daytime.
    The dark wooden front door looked as forbidding as a tightly closed mouth, and Meggie involuntarily reached for Mo's hand as they approached it.
    Dustfinger followed warily, with his battered backpack over his shoulder. Gwin was probably still asleep inside it. When Mo and Meggie went up to the door he kept a couple of steps behind them, looking uneasily at the closed shutters as if he suspected that the mistress of the house was watching them from one of the windows.
    There was a small barred window beside the front door, the only one not hidden behind green shutters. Below it was another notice:
    IF YOU INTEND TO WASTE MY TIME
    ON TRIVIA, YOU'D BETTER GO AWAY NOW.
    Meggie cast Mo an anxious glance, but he only made an encouraging face at her and pressed the bell.
    22

    Meggie heard it ringing inside the big house, but nothing happened for quite a while. A magpie fluttered out of one of the rhododendron bushes growing near the house, and a couple of fat sparrows pecked busily at invisible insects in the gravel, but that was all. Meggie was just throwing them the