The witch anointed her shoulder with the charm, after having first made a drop of potion out of the bubbles in it.  This potion she drank, and was healed of her wound and her weariness, and of all desires except a desire to sleep with her face among the daffodils.  She was the most beautifully alone person in the world that morning; nobody could have found her.  A thin string of very blue smoke went up from her faint fire and was tangled among the boughs of a flowering tree, but the coarse eye of a park-keeper could never have seen it.  She had escaped from the net of the cruel hours; for her the stained world was washed clean; for her all horror held its breath; for her there was absolute spring, and an innocent sun, and the shadows of daffodils upon closed eyes....

CHAPTER VII

THE FAERY FARM

Sarah Brown, finding herself unfetched by the witch, went home alone as soon as the ’buses began putting out to sea after the storm.  She expected to find the witch at home, but only the Dog David and Peony were in the House of Living Alone.  David lay on Peony’s bed, and Peony under it.  Sarah Brown saw them as she passed their open door.

“Ow Marmaduke!” said Peony, “is it all over?  Are you sure?  Them ’uns is so bloody deceitful you never know but what they might go an’ blow a bugle or two to mike believe they’d done, an’ then drops bombs on us just as we was comin’ ’appily out from under our beds.”

Peony, with a touching faith in the combined protective powers of twelve inches of mattress and nine inches of dog, had been reading a little paper book called Love in Society by the light of an electric torch.

“It’s all truly over,” said Sarah Brown, who had come home through a roar of rumour.  “They say we’ve brought down at least one Boche.  In fact the ferryman says his aunt telephoned that the special on her corner says a female Boche was brought down.  But that hardly sounds likely.  Hasn’t the witch come home yet?”

“Lawd no,” replied Peony.  “The dear ol’ Soup never comes ’ome of a moonlight night.  It’s my belief she goes to Maiden’ead among the Jews, to keep out of the wiy, and ’oo’s to blime ’er?”

“Well, that’s all right,” said Sarah Brown.  “For now I shall be able to buy—­without pawning anything for the moment—­a little land outfit from stock.  I know she has some.”

The night was by then far from young, in fact it was well into its second childhood.  But Sarah Brown and the Dog David sought and tried on land outfits for several hours.