that she allowed herself certain privileges.

It was a dismal late fall afternoon, but[106] English people and particularly English children do not stay indoors because of bad weather.

[106]

Frieda wore a blue rain proof coat and a soft hat which she pulled down over her yellow hair, to keep the soft mist out of her eyes as well as she could. Jimmie and his nurse were also enveloped in mackintoshes.

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[107] 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."

[107]

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 

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