But the rain was not actually falling. There was only a November haze and a pervading dampness, making Jimmie's cheeks redder than ever and bringing more color than was usual to Frieda's face.
On the way to the village Jimmie and his aunt, whom he regarded as of his own age, sang "America" in not a particularly musical fashion, but with a great deal of earnest effort, since Frieda was trying to teach the British Jimmie to be more of an American.
Jimmie, of course, wished to go into Mrs. Huggins' cottage with his aunt, but on that point Frieda was resolute. She had a fancy for seeing her old friend alone this afternoon. Actually she had a reason which had been developing in her mind for the past twenty-four hours, although Frieda herself considered her reason nonsensical.
In answer to her knock the old woman came to the door. She looked like one of the pictures one remembers in the Mother Goose books, and also like one of them, "she lived alone, all in her little house of stone."
Dame Quick's cottage of two rooms was set in the middle of a long row of little stone houses, in one of the half a dozen streets in Granchester. Frieda always felt a shiver as she went inside, since the floor was of stone and there was a dampness about the little house as if it had never been thoroughly warmed inside by the sun.
Yet Mrs. Huggins had managed to live there in contentment for about seventy years. She had come there as a bride before she was twenty and was now "ninety or thereabouts," as she described herself.
When Frieda entered she bobbed up and down as quickly as an old brown cork on a running stream.
"Sure, I've been waitin' and longin' for the sight of you these two hours," she said, taking Frieda's packages, or as many as she could get hold of, as if she thought them too burdensome for the young woman to carry.
Frieda laughed and slipped out of her rain coat, which she hung carefully on a small wooden chair. Then she also laid her hat on the chair and, as a matter of habit, fluffed up her pretty hair which the rain and her hat had flattened, and then followed her old hostess.
"You know you have had half a dozen visitors during the two hours you say you have been waiting, Mrs. Huggins," Frieda returned. For it was true that the tiny house and the old woman were the center of all the gossip in the village. "I expect you to tell me a lot of news."