“We’re coming, ponies, we’re coming,” it seemed as if the little satisfied toss of their heads meant that they were pleased that she was coming too!
It was a cold day, but dry and crisp, and Mary felt very cosy with the soft grey cape on the top of her own little scarlet cloth jacket. Miss Verity drove quickly, though, as she told Mary, they had not so very far to go.
“But I shall have to stay half-an-hour or so at Crook Edge, the house I want to call at,” she added. “I am going to say good-bye to two girls, who have lived there for some years with their father. He died last year, and now they are leaving for good. Blanche, the elder, is going to be married, and her younger sister, who is scarcely grown-up, is to live with her. They are very sweet girls.”
“Are you very sorry to say good-bye to them?” Mary asked.
Miss Verity hesitated.
“For my own sake, yes. But I am glad for them. It would have been too quiet a life at Crook Edge. It is an out-of-the-way place, at the side of the loneliest part of the forest.”
“Everywhere about here seems to have to do with the forest, doesn’t it?” said Mary.
“Yes, it never lets itself be forgotten,” her godmother replied, glancing as she spoke at the dark green line a little distance off, which seemed as it were to follow them as they went, “and we who love it and almost feel as if we were its children, don’t want ever to forget it.”
“No, no, of course not,” said Mary eagerly. “I feel like that too, though I haven’t been very long here. I know quite how you mean.”
Miss Verity smiled, the very pleased kind of smile that, as Mary had learnt to know, told of her liking to feel that her little god-daughter understood and sympathised in feelings that some children would not have been able to share.