“It was hard for me to keep awake, too, for everything was asleep, even the owls, I think. It was wonderful, wasn’t it, Jean, there in the still night? I’d always wanted to be out in the woods in the middle of the night, not just evening. When early morning came we were at the edge of the forest, and we went right up to the old green mill-inn!” Marie Josephine leaned forward eagerly as she went on, one hand stretched across the table: “The minute I saw the dark woman, I recognized her as the one who waited on us at lunch last summer, but of course I wasn’t a bit frightened because she thought we were just little tramp children. She was just going to tell us to be off when—what do you think?” She paused impressively.
“What!” exclaimed Lisle.
He was listening eagerly, a bit of color in his cheeks. Dian watched him, wondering if the first Lisle Saint Frère had been like him. Dian, too, was listening with all his heart to everything that Marie Josephine was saying.
“Why, all of a sudden, who should appear at the edge of the forest and come running to us but Flambeau!”
They all laughed at this statement, but their laughter sounded so odd, echoing through the long, low hollows and arches of the ancient place that they stopped almost as soon as they began, and Marie Josephine went on with her story. She told how the woman suddenly became very friendly and ushered them inside, how she became suspicious of the woman, and how Jean tried the door and found it bolted.
“I couldn’t be really sure it was the same woman I’d seen under our oak at Les Vignes, but I was almost sure, and I knew when we found that we were locked in.” They listened breathlessly while she told of the eave’s trough and their escape.
“You talk for a while, Jean. Tell them the rest. Jean was so splendid. It was all his idea about the trough and the tree.” Marie Josephine sat back and rubbed her eyes, which smarted a little from the smoke of the fast-dying fire.
Dian sat with his hands on his knees, his face almost stern in its earnestness. The woman from the green mill had been spying. He had always felt that it was a strange place, and so had Neville, though they had had no real reason to suspect it. He hoped with all his heart that the adventure of the green mill had been only an episode in the children’s strange journey, and that there would not be anything further to fear from that direction.
Jean told of the happy meeting with the man who drove the coach.
“There isn’t much to tell about it, for we went right to sleep and slept all day. The driver was a very nice man, and when I woke up I went and sat on the box with him, and we talked about all that’s going on. He told me his brother was fighting with the army of the Revolution. He was a kind man even if he was cross-eyed.”