“I am glad there’s a fire,” said the child.  “Will it keep alight till the morning, do you think?”

The old servant shook her head.

“’Twould not be safe to leave it so that it would burn till morning,” she said.  “When you are in bed and asleep, little missie, you won’t want the fire.  Bed’s the warmest place.”

“It isn’t for that I want it,” said Griselda; “it’s for the light I like it.  This house all looks so dark to me, and yet there seem to be lights hidden in the walls too, they shine so.”

The old servant smiled.

“It will all seem strange to you, no doubt,” she said; “but you’ll get to like it, missie.  ’Tis a good old house, and those that know best love it well.”

“Whom do you mean?” said Griselda.  “Do you mean my great-aunts?”

“Ah, yes, and others beside,” replied the old woman.  “The rooks love it well, and others beside.  Did you ever hear tell of the ‘good people,’ missie, over the sea where you come from?”

“Fairies, do you mean?” cried Griselda, her eyes sparkling.  “Of course I’ve heard of them, but I never saw any.  Did you ever?”

“I couldn’t say,” answered the old woman.

“My mind is not young like yours, missie, and there are times when strange memories come back to me as of sights and sounds in a dream.  I am too old to see and hear as I once could.  We are all old here, missie.  ’Twas time something young came to the old house again.”

“How strange and queer everything seems!” thought Griselda, as she got into bed.  “I don’t feel as if I belonged to it a bit.  And they are all so old; perhaps they won’t like having a child among them?”

The very same thought that had occurred to the rooks!  They could not decide as to the fors and againsts at all, so they settled to put it to the vote the next morning, and in the meantime they and Griselda all went to sleep.

I never heard if they slept well that night; after such unusual excitement it was hardly to be expected they would.  But Griselda, being a little girl and not a rook, was so tired that two minutes after she had tucked herself up in bed she was quite sound asleep, and did not wake for several hours.

“I wonder what it will all look like in the morning,” was her last waking thought.  “If it was summer now, or spring, I shouldn’t mind—­there would always be something nice to do then.”

As sometimes happens, when she woke again, very early in the morning, long before it was light, her thoughts went straight on with the same subject.

“If it was summer now, or spring,” she repeated to herself, just as if she had not been asleep at all—­like the man who fell into a trance for a hundred years just as he was saying “it is bitt—­” and when he woke up again finished the sentence as if nothing had happened—­“erly cold.”  “If only it was spring,” thought Griselda.

Just as she had got so far in her thoughts, she gave a great start.  What was it she heard?  Could her wish have come true?  Was this fairyland indeed that she had got to, where one only needs to wish, for it to be?  She rubbed her eyes, but it was too dark to see; that was not very fairyland-like, but her ears she felt certain had not deceived her:  she was quite, quite sure that she had heard the cuckoo!