“Don’t fight,” Helen told them softly. “Isn’t that a house over there where the smoke is?”
“It’s Cynthy Allan’s house,” Ingeborg looked around warningly as she spoke the name. “I’m not allowed to go there. She’s queer.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Kit cried. “I love queer people. Let’s all go over and call on Cynthy. How old is she, Ingeborg?”
“Oh, very old, over seventy. But she thinks she is only about seventeen, and she’s always doing flighty things. She’s lived out in the woods all summer, and she ran away from her family.”
“She won’t hurt you, I suppose,” Sally explained. “Mother says she just worked herself crazy. Once she started to make doughnuts and they found her hanging them on nails all over her kitchen, the round doughnuts, I mean. Lots of them. So folks have been afraid of her ever since.”
“Just because she made a lot of doughnuts and hung them around her kitchen? I think that’s lovely,” Kit cried. “What fun she must have had. Maybe she just did it to nonplus people.”
“I don’t know,” Sally said doubtfully. “She took to the woods after that, and now she lives in the house along with about fourteen cats.”
“I shall call on Cynthy today, won’t you, Jean?”
“I’d like to get warmed up before we skate back,” Jean agreed. “I don’t suppose she’d mind. If you don’t want to, Ingeborg, you could wait for us.”
Ingeborg thought waiting the wiser plan, but the rest of them took off their skates, and started up over the fields towards the little grey house in the snow. There were bare rose bushes around the front door and lilacs at the back. Several cats scudded away at their approach and took refuge in the woodshed, and at the side window there appeared a face, a long, haggard, old face, supported on one old, thin hand that incessantly moved to hide the trembling of the lips. Kit, on the impulse of the moment, waved to her, and smiled.