expectation, as though one knew that
there was some one behind the door and was therefore afraid to open it.
It may have been simply London that was behind it. Maggie was ready to
attribute anything to the influence of that tremendous power, but her
own final impression was that the people in this house had for too long
a time been brooding over something. "It would do my aunts a lot of
good to move somewhere else," she said to herself. "As Aunt Anne loves
the country so much I can't think why she doesn't live there." There
were many things that she was to learn before the end of the day.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a little whirr and clatter, which,
thin and distant though it was, penetrated into her room. The whirr was
followed by the voice, clear, self-confident and cheerful, of a cuckoo.
Maggie was in an instant out of bed, into the passage and standing, in
her nightdress, before a high, old cuckoo-clock that stood at the top
of the stairs. The wooden bird, looking down at her in friendly
fashion, "cuckooed" eight times, flapped his wings at her and
disappeared. It is a sufficient witness to Maggie's youth and
inexperience that she was enraptured by this event. It was not only
that she had never seen a cuckoo-clock before; she had, for that
matter, never heard of the existence of such a thing. It gave her
greater happiness than any bare mechanical discovery could have done.
The bird seemed to have come to her, in the friendliest way, to remove
some of the chilly passivity of the house. Her greatest fear since her
arrival had been that this was a house "in which nothing was ever going
to happen," and that "she would never get out of it." "It will be just
as it has been all my life, seeing nothing, doing nothing--only instead
of father it will be the aunts." The bird seemed to promise her
adventure and excitement. To most people it would have been only a
further sign of an old-fashioned household far behind the times. To
Maggie it was thrilling and encouraging. He would remind her every hour
of the day of the possibility of fun in a world that was full of
surprises. She heard suddenly a step behind her and a dry voice saying:

"Your hot water, Miss Maggie."

She turned round, blushing at being caught staring up at a cuckoo-clock
like a baby in her nightdress, to face the wrinkled old woman who the
night before had brought her, with a grudging countenance, her supper.
Maggie had thought then that this old Mart