"Yes," said Georgie. "She may be just pretending to get us under her thumb, like the wicked witches do in the fairy stories."
"No," said Ruffie in his decided little voice, "her face couldn't be a witch's. She looks at me as if she—well, you know—liked me ever so."
"That's only the spell in her eye! I'm going to wait. If I find her out, it will be war at the end of the month."
"She wants to do nice things for us," went on Ruffie; "she's going to have flowers in the conservatory, and one end of it she's going to have doves and birds in a big room with trees and nests in it. She calls it an 'aviary.'"
"That's another spell," said Josie, but there was hesitation in her tone.
"Well, we've got a month to find out what she's like," said Georgie. "Anyhow, she doesn't worry us with lessons."
"But," said Anstice to herself, with a shake of her head, "that is exactly what I am going to do, my poor dears."
The very next day she set out on her errand to Mrs. Fergusson's.
The fine weather had suddenly departed. Rain and mist set in from over the Fells. But Anstice was indifferent to weather. She started out for her two-mile walk in waterproof coat and skirt, and revelled in the moist sweet air, and the scent of wet pines and earth as she passed along the wooded road. She turned up from the high road before long, and then winding up and down she reached a little cottage in front of a cluster of pines, with a magnificent view of the lake below, and the Fells beyond it.
The door was opened to her by the tall, handsome woman she had noticed in church.