“I suppose I may! Oh, I must! No one lives here. Rene said so.” In she went.
A two-roomed little one-storied cottage. Its two rooms opened into each other, and the door between gaped wide. As Betty entered the first room she could survey the entire house.
Was it a witch’s cottage? she asked herself suddenly, as she stood there staring. Could it be, after all?
For, absolutely empty of furnishings as it certainly was, with its paper peeling miserably from its walls; with damp running down them; with insects holding carnival in its corners; with its shutters flapping by rusty hinges outside its broken panes—yet—yet, strange and wonderful to say, arranged in a primitive design on the dirty floor of the room, lay flowers! Fresh and fragrant, in a quaint, almost elfin-like pattern. Wild hyacinths, late primroses, anemones, stars of Bethlehem—the floor of the room seemed carpeted with them as though some quaint idea of design had been at the back of some one’s mind. For “some one” must have done it—a “some one,” Betty was certain, who must be of fairy origin.
“I am trespassing,” she said suddenly out loud. And she turned and found herself hurrying away, though she couldn’t have expressed the reason of her flight in words. “Some one is looking after it. It isn’t so miserable as it looks outside,” she told herself, as she ran with her heart thumping. “It must be a fairy house.”
Was it a witch’s cottage?
But as her heart stopped thumping she began to try to think things out more common-sensibly. “I’m thirteen,” said Betty to herself; “and though Sybil does say that fairies aren’t babyish to believe in, yet I do know that to find a cottage like that is absolutely queer. Jan and Jack would believe in it, but I hardly can. Still it was there; and the wood is called Witch’s Wood by everybody. And Rene says that the villagers are afraid of it. I could never be afraid of whoever it is who puts those flowers there. Not that it can be haunted—” She broke off. “Well, now, I simply must find my way out,” she said, trying to banish the mystery of the cottage from her mind.
It was a difficult business, but she managed at last. After turning and twisting through the trees of Witch’s Wood, she came suddenly at last within sight and sound of the everyday humdrum world again.