But going back was not quite so simple a course as she had expected. She had forgotten to notice any distinguishing features on any of the trees, and now they all seemed alike.
“Here’s a hurdle sort of thing. Did I pass it before?” she asked herself. “And that tree; it looks familiar somehow. If I only knew which way St. Benedick’s lies! The rest of the Guides have compasses, and Gerry said they made it much easier to find one’s way. I shall ask her to-morrow. But now I don’t know exactly where I am.” She turned and walked on. “I rather think, if I pass these trees, that I see that clearing-place beginning again just beyond.”
She was not in the least nervous, for, after all, the school must be very near. The adventure was “thrilly,” she decided. It was not until the next trees had been passed, and the “clearing-place” reached, that Betty suddenly stood still and stared.
“Why!” she said.
For this was not the bare patch between the trees which she had passed before—just beyond the beeches which separated it from St. Benedick’s. This was a clearing, certainly, but quite a different one. The ground was studded with clumps of bracken and with tussocks of blue-bells; but there was something else in the clearing too.
A cottage! A little tumble-down desolate cottage! And at the sight of it Betty stood perfectly still, staring with eyes filled with wonder.
“I’ve come wrong! It’s the witch’s cottage,” she said. “Oh, you poor thing!”
For if ever a tiny forsaken dwelling was in need of Betty’s motherly ministrations, this cottage certainly seemed that one. The fact that it was presumably “haunted,” and shunned by the villagers in consequence; the fact that a witch might still have her abode there; even the fact that she herself must certainly be considered by the law in the light of a trespasser, were forgotten as she gazed.
“I must be in Witch’s Wood,” she said to herself. “Rene said it was close; but I didn’t understand that I could come into it without knowing. A fence, she said. Well, that hurdle thing must have been part of a broken-down old fence. I’ve come a good way too.”
But she was hurrying forward all the same as she spoke. For she couldn’t do anything else. She could not turn back until she had “done something” for the little place which looked so desperately in need of mothering. Its roof was broken, if a roof the cottage could still be said to possess. Its door seemed to flap open mournfully. Its windows were cracked and broken. Mosses and lichens grew on its walls. Desolation seemed to be its very name. Betty broke into a run, therefore; then, as she reached its step, she hesitated before she entered.