'Not prettier, but there must have been such jolly corners and hiding-places,' said Serena. Her head was full of hiding. 'There'd be nowhere to hide in this church. You'd be seen in a minute.'
'Nobody wants to hide in church,' I said; 'that's not what people come for.'
'They might though,' said Serena; 'that's to say, supposing any one got locked up in a church all night, they'd like to have some comfortable corner to creep into where nobody could get at them.'
'But there'd be nobody to get at them,' said Anne. 'I don't say I'd like at all to be shut up in a church all night; still, the best of it would be you'd know you were safe from anybody.'
Serry didn't seem convinced.
'I don't know,' she said. 'There might be—well, bats and owls and things like that, and then there'd be feelings. You'd be sure to fancy there were people or things there, and it wouldn't be half so frightening if you could get into a pew with a carpet, and make a bed of the cushions and hassocks.'
'Eh,' said nurse all of a sudden, 'you put me in mind, Miss Serry, of an old story my mother told me when I was a child.'
'Oh, do tell it us,' cried Maud.
But nurse said we must wait, of course, till we were out of the church. Nurse has quite proper feelings about churches, though, when she was little, she belonged to the Scotch kirk, you know, which is different. She said she'd tell us the story either on the way home or after tea when we were all sitting together in our kitchen-parlour, for it was too damp an evening for us to go out again.
And at first we thought we'd have the story on the way home, but then we settled we'd wait till the evening. For there were plenty of things to amuse us going home; I had to show them the post office and the shops—we went farther down the village on purpose,—and I don't think stories are ever quite so nice when people are walking as when they're sitting still.