THE YELLOW PATCH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22226, 28 September 1935, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE YELLOW PATCH

Angela ran through the little doorway and knelt beside them. There they were, in all their golden beauty, hiding in the haunted house till somebody wise enough not to pluck them all found them.

There was the long double pod instead of the capsule-bearing seed as in other poppies, that Miss Adams had told them about. How pleased she would be, and how lucky it was that the botany lesson caino the next morning! . The nex~t ,dav Angela arrived at school with flushed cheeks. She marched up to Miss Adams' desk and shyly presented her with a single yellow horned poppy. " Why, Angela, my dear child, where did vou find this?"

" I found a little patch of them yesterday. I picked only one, in the haunted house." There was a dead silence for a moment, then Winifred Ray, the head girl, who knew all about the challenge, got up and cried, " What a little brick! Three cheers for Angela Hood!" And, strange to say, Peggy's cheers were the loudest.

She was the youngest girl in tbo school as well as tho shyest, and she had been a Brownie for a week when Peggy Wayne called her ' a silly kid because she screamod when sho found a mouse in Iter locker. Peggy was a Brownie, too, but such an old and wise one that before long she would have grown into a blue-clad Girl Guide, and probably never notice such a shy little Brownie as Angela. Not that Angela would mind that. She found school life so bewildering that it made things harder when the critical Peggy drew attention to all the mistakes she made. To bo continually called silly mado her feel silly too, and she did all sorts of foolish tilings that she would never have done if Peggy's eyes had not been upon her. Angela was not a boarder. She walked two miles to school every morning and returned at four o'clock. The way home was across fields, and in one of them, about two hundred yards from tbo footpath, there was the ruin of an old house which had been roofless for over fifty years. Everybody called it tho haunted house, * and there was a superstition that if anybody ventured through its broken doorway ill-luck would pursue them for seven years, and they would encounter the old woman miser who was said to haunt it. Angela knew this was all nonsense, of course, but, if tho truth must be told, she always took to her heels and ran when she approached tho haunted house, especially on dusky afternoons. Then Peggy found this out, and she waited until everyone was present, and said: "I say, Angela, why on earth do you run like that when you pass the haunted house? Pamela and I saw vou simply bolt across tho fields yesterday." Angela, blushing, murmured that she was in a hurry. " Hurry I I like that I In a fright, more likely. I say, girls, this silly kid is frightened of the haunted house!" " I'm not!" cried the scarlet Angela —to be frightened of ghosts was far worse than to bo frightened of a mouse, according to Peggy and her superior friends. " Then why do you run?" asked Peggy. " You are afraid. If you're not why don't you go into tho house and prove it?" "I will!" cried Angola. "I'll go this very afternoon!" " Very well, Miss Angela Bold, go; and if you meet the ghost tell her nobody but silly kids believe in her in these days." As Angela put on her hat, when afternoon school was over, she was not mado happier by hearing Peggy say: " That kid go in the haunted house! She'll bolt at the sight of it; you see!" It was a dull afternoon, with dark windy clouds driving from the west, and as Angela approached the old ruin her knees began to tremble. Of course it was silly to believe in ghosts. Miss Adams, her form mistress, said superstition was another word for ignorance; but Angela did wish the wind would not sound like the old miser woman shrieking. But Brownies couldn't- be cowards, and. besides, sho had told Peggy she would go. The walls of the house were standing but the floors had gone long ago, and as Angela, with beating heart, peered through the broken doorway, she saw the old ruin was carpeted with green grass. An inner wall with another doorway led to a tiny corner room looking to the sea, and, as Angela peeped, all thoughts of haunted houses and ghostly old miser women fled. On the grassy floor of the little room was a patch of yellow—the bright yellow of the horned poppies that Miss Adams, an enthusiastic botanist, and her pupils had been searching for all the term.