“Yes.”
“Then what was it?” Mother asked. And they could not tell her. It is sometimes awfully difficult to tell things to your mother, however much you love her. The best Francis could do was:
“Well—you see we’re not used to her.”
And Kathleen said: “I don’t think perhaps she’s used to being an aunt. But she was kind.”
And Mother was wise and didn’t ask any more questions. Also she at once abandoned an idea one had had of asking Aunt Enid to come and stay at Beachfield for part of the holidays; and this was just as well, for if Aunt Enid had not passed out of the story exactly when she did, there would not have been any story to pass out of. And as she does now pass out of the story I will say that she thought she was very kind, and that she meant extremely well.
There was a little whispering between Francis and Mavis just after tea, and a little more just before bed, but it was tactfully done and the unwhispered-to younger ones never noticed it.
The lodgings were very nice—a little way out of the town—not a villa at all as everyone had feared. I suppose the landlady thought it grander to call it a villa, but it was really a house that had once been a mill house, and was all made of a soft-colored gray wood with a red-tiled roof, and at the back was the old mill, also gray and beautiful—not used now for what it was built for—but just as a store for fishing nets and wheelbarrows and old rabbit hutches and beehives and harnesses and odds and ends, and the sack of food for the landlady’s chickens. There was a great corn bin there too—that must have been in some big stable—and some broken chairs and an old wooden cradle that hadn’t had any babies in it since the landlady’s mother was a little girl.
On any ordinary holiday the mill would have had all the charm of a magic palace for the children, with its wonderful collection of pleasant and unusual things to play with, but just now all their thoughts were on Mermaids. And the two elder ones decided that they would go out alone the first thing in the morning and look for the Mermaid.
Mavis woke Francis up very early indeed, and they got up and dressed quite quietly, not washing, I am sorry to say, because water makes such a noise when you pour it out. And I am afraid their hair was not very thoroughly brushed either. There was not a soul stirring in the road as they went out, unless you count the mill cat who had been out all night and was creeping home very tired and dusty looking, and a yellowhammer who sat on a tree a hundred yards down the road and repeated his name over and over again in that conceited way yellowhammers have, until they got close to him; and then he wagged his tail impudently at them and flew on to the next tree where he began to talk about himself as loudly as ever.