“But, I expect,” she added. “It would only come if I were in the most awful trouble and all human aid despaired of.”
“Well, we’re not that now,” said Edred, knocking the head off a poppy with his stick, “and I’m jolly glad we’re not.”
“I wonder,” said Elfrida, “who lives in that cottage where the witch was. I know exactly where it is. I expect it’s been pulled down, though. Let’s go round that way. It’ll be something to do.”
So they went round that way, and the way was quite easy to find. But when they got to the place where the tumbledown cottage had been in Boney’s time, there was only a little slate-roofed house with a blue bill pasted up on its yellow-brick face saying that somebody’s A1 ginger-beer and up-to-date minerals were sold there. The house was dull to look at, and they did not happen to have any spare money for ginger-beer, so they turned round to go home and suddenly found themselves face to face with a woman. She wore a red-and-black plaid blouse and a bought ready-made black skirt, and on her head was a man’s peaked cap such as women in the country wear now instead of the pretty sun bonnets that they used to wear when I was a little girl.
“So they’ve pulled the old cottage down,” she said. “This new house’ll be fine and dry inside, I lay. The rain comes in through the roof of the old one so’s you might a’most as well be laying in the open medder.”
The children listened politely, and both were wondering where they had seen this woman before, for her face was strangely familiar to them, and yet they didn’t seem really to know her either.
“Most of the cottages ’bout here is just as bad as they always was,” she went on. “When Arden has the handling of the treasure he’ll see to it that poor folks lie warm and dry, won’t he now?”
And then all in a minute the children both knew, and she knew that they knew.
“Why,” said Edred, “you’re the——”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m the witch come from old ancient times. If you can go back I can go forth, because then and now’s the same if I know how to make a clock.”