It was a difficult business, but she managed at last. After turning and twisting through the trees of Witch’s Wood, she came suddenly at last within sight and sound of the everyday humdrum world again. “I’m evidently some way from St. Benedick’s,” she thought, “but I’m coming out at last. I can see a road; and when I get to the fence, any one I meet will show me the way. Why, what’s that?” For she had reached the fence now, and voices were plainly audible from the road below. Lusty laughter and shoutings; evidently a crowd of village urchins were playing there. Betty made up her mind to wait until they had passed by. She did not wish to make a descent from Witch’s Wood until the coast was clear of them. She peeped through the broken palings and then suddenly changed her mind. For a whole crowd of good-for-nothing small boys had collected, and were circling round one of their number who seemed to Betty, from her hiding-place, the queerest figure on which she had ever set eyes. He was a tall boy of perhaps her own age, but tattered and torn as she had never seen a boy before; his garments seemed quaint, too, almost ludicrous, and he seemed trying, as he stood there, to hold his own unaided against the jeering, cat-calling throng. At the sight Betty’s eyes blazed, and she was over the fence like a flash. “Let him alone this instant,” called she to the amazed and terrified group. For terrified they were at the sight of her, appearing as she did over the fence of Witch’s Wood. In one instant, to a boy, the crowd had dispersed in the opposite direction, leaving their victim alone. The stranger might have been aged fourteen, but his clothes were evidently intended for a younger boy by far, and they had been patched and mended so thoroughly, and with such disregard for colour-matching, that he seemed to possess a piebald appearance. His head was covered, too, with a shock of the roughest hair Betty had ever seen; and by the expression of his face it was plain that he was simple-minded. His cheek was cut and bleeding too; but he seemed to take little notice of his hurts. Instead, he made straight for Betty, shaking his fist and pointing to the wood. “You munna go nigh Witch’s Wood. You munna. You munna go nigh it. There’s witches in it, and ghostses, and spookses; you munna go nigh it.” He shook and shivered as he pointed there. “It’s all right,” said Betty in her motherly tone. “Don’t worry. I lost my way; but I shan’t go there again. If you will tell me where there is a stream, I’d like to wash that cut, though, on your cheek.” CHAPTER IX BETTY KEEPS A SECRET “I say,” remarked the inhabitants of Dormitory Three in chorus. Not that they were assembled in the dormitory, but “hasten slowly” time was just over on the afternoon of the day following Betty’s adventure in the wood.