She had rather a happy feeling as she[110] watched Mrs. Huggins, as if she had been a little girl who had gone out one day and grown suddenly tired and forlorn, and then been unexpectedly invited into the very gingerbread house itself. But a gingerbread house presided over by a good spirit, not an evil one.

[110]

Her own little Dame Quick looked like a child's idea of an ancient good fairy. She may not have been so small to begin with, but at ninety she was bent over until she seemed very tiny indeed. Her face was brown and wrinkled and her eyes shone forth as black as elderberries in the late gathering time.

She placed a small wooden table in front of Frieda and not far from the fire and her own chair. Then she got out some heavy plates and two cups and saucers. And whatever the difference in elegance, tea is never so good served in a thin cup as in a thick one. Afterwards she opened the package containing Frieda's biscuits and jam and finally poured boiling water into her own brown stone tea kettle.

Then she and Frieda, sitting on opposite sides of the tea table, talked and talked.

Several times, as she sat there, Frieda[111] thought that if she had been an English girl she would like to have had just such an old nurse or foster mother as Mrs. Huggins. For she might then have been able to confide a number of things to her—matters she could not talk about even to her sister, since she was not clear enough how she felt concerning them herself, and so Jack might get wrong impressions.

[111]

"But you have not told me any special news this afternoon," Frieda protested, having lifted her cup for a second helping of tea, and making up her mind that she could not think of herself while visiting, as she usually did at home. "My sister and brother always expect me to know something interesting after a visit to you."

Dame Quick poured the tea carefully.

"I don't care for gossip," she returned, "yet it seems as if they like it as much in big houses as in little." Her eyes snapped, so that Frieda found herself watching them, fascinated.

"Since you came in I've been wonderin' whether certain information should be sent to Lord and Lady Kent. I don't think much of it myself, as there has been such a steady stream of spy talk these[112] months past. But they are tellin' in Granchester that 

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