'What is this? What is this?' they kept asking touching the
children's clothes curiously.

Anthea hastily took off Jane's frilly lace collar and handed it
to the woman who seemed most friendly.

'Take this,' she said, 'and look at it. And leave us alone. We
want to talk among ourselves.'

She spoke in the tone of authority which she had always found
successful when she had not time to coax her baby brother to do
as he was told. The tone was just as successful now. The
children were left together and the crowd retreated. It paused a
dozen yards away to look at the lace collar and to go on talking
as hard as it could.

The children will never know what those people said, though they
knew well enough that they, the four strangers, were the subject
of the talk. They tried to comfort themselves by remembering the
girl's promise of friendliness, but of course the thought of the
charm was more comfortable than anything else. They sat down on
the sand in the shadow of the hedged-round place in the middle of
the village, and now for the first time they were able to look
about them and to see something more than a crowd of eager,
curious faces.

They here noticed that the women wore necklaces made of beads of
different coloured stone, and from these hung pendants of odd,
strange shapes, and some of them had bracelets of ivory and