They found themselves in a round, cave-like room, which was lit up by the dancing flames of a log fire. Afterward Jack and Molly could not remember seeing any furniture in the room—nothing but the fire and a stone-arched fireplace. They could not recall seeing any windows, but they remembered the floor, which was made of cobbles, because it was hard to walk on. The room appeared to have no ceiling, or else a very high one, at any rate no ceiling was visible; overhead all was drifting smoke and black gloom, like the entrance to a railway tunnel.
“Let’s have a look at the pretty dears,” said the figure beside the girl, moving forward, and Jack and Molly stood face to face with the ugliest old woman they had ever seen, in fact, had ever even imagined. Her clay-coloured face was a mass of deep wrinkles; her narrow, sunken eyes looked like two restless black beads, darting from side to side, as if to escape from the two slits of eyelids which imprisoned them. Her nose and chin curved towards each other, after the fashion of nut-crackers, and her otherwise toothless mouth had one long yellow fang always visible. A bright crimson scarf was wound round her head, like a turban, from which long wisps of jet black hair escaped and hung about her face.
As the children looked at her, she did a terrifying thing (which they quickly discovered was a constant habit of hers). The old woman’s restless beady eyes became suddenly still, and she fixed upon the children in turn a piercing stare, gradually opening her eyes wider and wider and wider until they became two big round black balls encircled by saucers of white—great, staring, still eyes ... then suddenly the lids snapped over them, and they were once more little darting black beads.
“Heh! Heh! Heh!” laughed the old woman. “What a surprise for yer, duckies, wasn’t it, now?” And she thrust her face close to the children and leered unpleasantly. “Stoopid little baggages!” she added. “Far for better you’d stopped at home—meddlin’ in what don’t concern you. But we’ll soon learn you to come a-meddlin’.” She turned to the girl behind her. “All right,” she said in an undertone. “I’d know ’em again. I’ve had a good look. When’s he coming?”
“In about an hour, I expect,” answered the girl. Then she dropped her voice and started whispering again.
The two children gazed into each other’s frightened white faces, and a little sob escaped from Molly.
“Eh?” said the old woman. “What you say, ducky?... Nothing?... All right. Come along then, my pretties, come along and wait in the drorin’-room. His Excellency the Grey Pumpkin is not at home just at present, but he won’t be long; oh, dear no, he won’t be long. Step this way in the drorin’-room. He’ll be pleased to see yer. Heh! Heh!”
Molly glanced despairingly at the girl in green, the girl who had been so friendly a short time before when they were outside in the lane. Molly held out her hands appealingly—but the girl only laughed.
“Oh have you no pity?” cried Molly. “Do, do let us go. He’ll never know—the Pumpkin need never know. And—and if there is anything we can do for you, I’m sure my brother and I will be only too pleased....”