,' said Serena. Her head was full of hiding. 'There'd be
nowhere to hide in this church. You'd be seen in a minute.'

'Nobody wants to hide in church,' I said; 'that's not what people come
for.'

'They _might_ though,' said Serena; 'that's to say, supposing any one
got locked up in a church all night, they'd like to have some
comfortable corner to creep into where nobody could get at them.'

'But there'd be nobody _to_ get at them,' said Anne. 'I don't say I'd
like at all to be shut up in a church all night; still, the best of it
would be you'd know you were safe from anybody.'

Serry didn't seem convinced.

'I don't know,' she said. 'There might be--well, bats and owls and
things like that, and then there'd be _feelings_. You'd be sure to fancy
there were people or things there, and it wouldn't be half so
frightening if you could get into a pew with a carpet, and make a bed of
the cushions and hassocks.'

'Eh,' said nurse all of a sudden, 'you put me in mind, Miss Serry, of an
old story my mother told me when I was a child.'

'Oh, do tell it us,' cried Maud.

But nurse said we must wait, of course, till we were out of the church.
Nurse has quite proper feelings about churches, though, when she was
little, she belonged to the Scotch kirk, you know, which is different.
She said she'd tell us the story either on the way home or after tea
when we were all sitting together in our kitchen-parlour, for it was too
damp an evening for us to go out again.

And at first we thought we'd have the story on the way home, but then we
settled we'd wait till the evening. For there were plenty of things to
amuse us going home; I had to show them the post office and the
shops--we went farther down the village on purpose,--and I don't think
stories are ever quite so nice when people are walking as when they're
sitting still.

We all felt quite hungry when we got back to the farm, and we were very
glad that it was nearly tea time. Nurse was very pleased, for Anne and
Maud had never got back their good appetites since they'd been ill,
though Serry had never lost hers all through--I don't much think
_anything_ would make Serry lose her good appetite,--and of course _I'd_
kept all right.

After tea we helped nurse to clear away. We always did that at Mossmoor,
for you see mums had promised Mrs. Parsley that we should give as little
trouble as possible,--it wasn't as if she had been a lodging-house
keeper, and she had only one ser