ll her. It is sometimes awfully difficult to tell things to your mother, however much you love her. The best Francis could do was:

“Well—you see we’re not used to her.”

And Kathleen said: “I don’t think perhaps she’s used to being an aunt. But she was kind.”

And Mother was wise and didn’t ask any more questions. Also she at once abandoned an idea one had had of asking Aunt Enid to come and stay at Beachfield for part of the holidays; and this was just as well, for if Aunt Enid had not passed out of the story exactly when she did, there would not have been any story to pass out of. And as she does now pass out of the story I will say that she thought she was very kind, and that she meant extremely well.

There was a little whispering between Francis and Mavis just after tea, and a little more just before bed, but it was tactfully done and the unwhispered-to younger ones never noticed it.

[22]

The lodgings were very nice—a little way out of the town—not a villa at all as everyone had feared. I suppose the landlady thought it grander to call it a villa, but it was really a house that had once been a mill house, and was all made of a soft-colored gray wood with a red-tiled roof, and at the back was the old mill, also gray and beautiful—not used now for what it was built for—but just as a store for fishing nets and wheelbarrows and old rabbit hutches and beehives and harnesses and odds and ends, and the sack of food for the landlady’s chickens. There was a great corn bin there too—that must have been in some big stable—and some broken chairs and an old wooden cradle that hadn’t had any babies in it since the landlady’s mother was a little girl.

On any ordinary holiday the mill would have had all the charm of a m