“A cold place for an old lady,” said Noel.
Sir Harry laughed.
“His grandmother was supposed to be a witch,” he said. “I can just remember her when I was a boy. She was a white witch and lived down in Pear Tree Cottage, where you were this afternoon. She was supposed to turn into a black hare on moonlight nights. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t true. All the old people round here believe that she walks. Jasper believes that if he can shoot her she will be laid, but somehow he has never got that hare.”
Lydia was undergoing a violent inward conflict. Ought she or ought she not to tell her host about the silver button? Down in Jasper’s cottage it had seemed reasonable enough. Looked at now, in daylight or what was left of it, it seemed foolish. And what the etiquette was about witches she d
