“I must be in Witch’s Wood,” she said to herself. “Rene said it was close; but I didn’t understand that I could come into it without knowing. A fence, she said. Well, that hurdle thing must have been part of a broken-down old fence. I’ve come a good way too.” But she was hurrying forward all the same as she spoke. For she couldn’t do anything else. She could not turn back until she had “done something” for the little place which looked so desperately in need of mothering. Its roof was broken, if a roof the cottage could still be said to possess. Its door seemed to flap open mournfully. Its windows were cracked and broken. Mosses and lichens grew on its walls. Desolation seemed to be its very name. Betty broke into a run, therefore; then, as she reached its step, she hesitated before she entered. “I suppose I may! Oh, I must! No one lives here. Rene said so.” In she went. A two-roomed little one-storied cottage. Its two rooms opened into each other, and the door between gaped wide. As Betty entered the first room she could survey the entire house. Was it a witch’s cottage? she asked herself suddenly, as she stood there staring. _Could_ it be, after all? For, absolutely empty of furnishings as it certainly was, with its paper peeling miserably from its walls; with damp running down them; with insects holding carnival in its corners; with its shutters flapping by rusty hinges outside its broken panes--yet--yet, strange and wonderful to say, arranged in a primitive design on the dirty floor of the room, lay flowers! Fresh and fragrant, in a quaint, almost elfin-like pattern. Wild hyacinths, late primroses, anemones, stars of Bethlehem--the floor of the room seemed carpeted with them as though some quaint idea of design had been at the back of some one’s mind. For “some one” must have done it--a “some one,” Betty was certain, who must be of fairy origin. “I _am_ trespassing,” she said suddenly out loud. And she turned and found herself hurrying away, though she couldn’t have expressed the reason of her flight in words. “Some one is looking after it. It isn’t so miserable as it looks outside,” she told herself, as she ran with her heart thumping. “It must be a fairy house.” [Illustration: Was it a witch’s cottage?] But as her heart stopped thumping she began to try to think things out more common-sensibly. “I’m thirteen,” said Betty to herself; “and though Sybil does say that fairies aren’t babyish to believe in, yet I do know that to find a cottage like that is absolutely queer. Jan and Jack would believe in it, but I hardly can. Still it was there; and the wood is called Witch’s Wood by everybody. And Rene says that the villagers are afraid of it. I could never be _afraid_ of whoever it is who puts those flowers there. Not that it can be haunted--” She broke off. “Well, now, I simply _must_ find my way out,” she said, trying to banish the mystery of the cottage from her mind.