"You know you have had half a dozen visitors during the two hours you say you have been waiting, Mrs. Huggins," Frieda returned. For it was true that the tiny house and the old woman were the center of all the gossip in the village. "I expect you to tell me a lot of news." The old woman nodded. "It is true these are news days in England and elsewhere. Times were, when the days might be dull without a birth or a death, or a mating. But now one wakes up to something stirrin' every day--a lad goin' off to the war, or maybe one gettin' killed; and the girls coomin' in to tell me their troubles; some of them just married, and some of them not married at all yet. But all of them worryin' their hearts out. Sure, and if war is goin' on forever--and it looks like it is--I'm for the women goin' into battle along with their men." While she was talking Frieda had followed her hostess back into her kitchen--the room in which she really lived and had her being. It was also of stone, but the floor had a number of bright rag rugs as covering and the walls were lined with pictures cut from papers and magazines, and with picture postcards. One could have gotten a pretty fair knowledge of English history at the moment by studying Mrs. Huggins' picture gallery. She had on her walls a photograph of nearly every British officer then in command of the army or navy. She had replicas of innumerable battleships and also of statesmen. But in the place of honor over a shelf that held her Bible and a tiny daguerreotype of the late, lamented Mr. Huggins, hung a picture of England's big little man--Lloyd George. The aged woman received the old age pension which Lloyd George had given to the poor of England a few years before the outbreak of the present war. Frieda sat down on a little chair which lovers of antiques would have given much to possess. There was a small fire burning in the tiny stove, and its red coals looked more cheerful than the great log fire at Kent House. Frieda knew that Dame Quick would wish to prepare the tea herself. She had rather a happy feeling as she 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. 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.