“No, the trap comes,” said Stella. “We live off the road that goes to the station. It’s nearly five miles away; you must have passed it as you came, only you wouldn’t see the house, perhaps; it’s behind trees.”
“We saw _one_ house,” broke in Gretta excitedly--“a little house with no windows.”
“Did you notice _that_?” exclaimed Stella with animation. “The ‘Little House’! Oh, what do you think of it?”
“I thought it was the rummiest place I’d ever seen,” declared Margot. “I’ve been longing to ask someone about it ever since we got here. We saw it first from the train, and then we saw it from the trap, and we asked Miss Read about it. Somehow or other she didn’t tell us much: something about an old man, but I thought--didn’t you, Gretta?--that she seemed to try and shut us up rather.”
“_No wonder!_” said Stella, in a hollow tone of mystery.
“Oh, do go on!” begged the Dormitory, intrigued by Stella’s mysterious accents.
“Not that I know much, but it’s so _queer_!” Stella, however, was evidently only too willing to oblige, so far as was possible. “All alone he lives! Looking out on the sea. All the windows that face the moorland are barred up. Of course, he’s mad!”
“Yes, or why ever would he live there like that?”
“He might be a--hermit.” Margot spoke rather slowly. “There was one that we knew, living in the Bush. He’d made a clearing-place there--just because he wanted to, and because he loved the Bush. He wasn’t mad at all. He’d come to us for food, sometimes. And sometimes I’d ride out and take him some.”
“Ride!” The Dormitory forgot the “Little House” and its inmate. “Did you ride in the Bush?”
“Yes, of course I rode. Why not? Dad and mother did. We all did. I helped in a sheep round-up once; I was always riding. Once I had to swim my horse over a river that was in flood. The horse was frightened, then; and so would I have been, only Long Jake was there to tell me what to do. He and dad had to do it often--swim their horses, I mean; because they were always riding for miles round the cattle-station.”
“And how did you swim your horse?” inquired Josy excitedly. “I wonder you weren’t drowned.”
“That was what I thought, just at first. I think the horse thought so, too. But Long Jake told me just to take my legs out of the stirrups and hold the pommel tight. To give him plenty of rein, too, and to let myself sort of float over the saddle. The horse did the rest. Boko, it was--my own horse.” Margot gave a little sigh as she suddenly came to earth in the Cliff School dormitory again, and found herself brushing her hair. “I say, Stella, I didn’t mean to interrupt about your old man. How do you take him food?”