"Now you may button this, Hecla," she said.
And Hecla, who was not clever with her fingers, struggled till she was scarlet in the face to get a rather difficult button into its hole. She stopped at length in despair, and to their surprise Ivy's little fingers did it at once quite deftly.
"Clever little thing!" Aunt Anne murmured.
"She's cleverer than me, isn't she—lots?" cried Hecla, overhearing what she was not meant to hear.
"Mummie always lets me dress myself," said Ivy.
"Then you shall do it another day," promised Miss Anne.
It was a lovely spring day, early spring, yet warm and sunny. They went outside the town; not towards the windmill, where Hecla had gone with Elisabeth one day, but in another direction, past the Vicarage and the old grey Church, and along a country road, with a little river beside it.
Presently they reached a place where the river disappeared under the road for a short distance, coming out soon on the other side. All this covered part was arched over, just like a particularly wide bridge, and that was what Hecla meant when she talked of the "bridge-part."
It was a grand play-place for the children of Nortonbury. They loved to throw in sticks and small boughs and sometimes little wooden boats at the upper end of the covered part, and then to rush to the lower end and watch for the said sticks or boughs or boats to come out, carried by a swift current through the long arch. The river just there was both deeper and more rapid than elsewhere, because it had to flow in a narrower channel.
Above the covered-over part the banks were steep; and the children would stand at the edge and fling in their boats. But at the lower end, there was a more shelving bank, so that they could easily climb down to the water brink, and could take them out, if the boats floated near enough.