"You got Mary!" the children crowed delightedly. "Mary's the hoodman now!"

The little five-year-old girl looked up at Jenny, her hazel eyes wide and apprehensive, her thin body shivering with fear. "Please," she whispered, clinging to Jenny's leg, "I-I not want to wear th' hood-'Twill be dark inside it. Do I got to wear it?"

Smiling reassuringly, Jenny tenderly smoothed Mary's hair off her thin face. "Not if you don't want."

"I'm afeert of the dark," Mary confided unnecessarily, her narrow shoulders drooping with shame.

Sweeping her up into her arms, Jenny hugged her tightly. "Everybody is afraid of something," she said and teasingly added, "Why, I'm afraid of-of frogs!"

The dishonest admission made the little girl giggle. "Frogs!" she repeated, "I likes frogs! They don't sceer me 'tall."

"There, you see-" Jenny said as she lowered her to the ground. "You're very brave. Braver than I!"

"Lady Jenny is afeart of silly of frogs," Mary told the group of children as they ran forward.

"No she isn-" young Tom began, quick to rise to the defense of the beautiful Lady Jenny who, despite her lofty rank, was always up to anything-including hitching up her skirts and wading in the pond to help him catch a fat bullfrog-or climbing up a tree, quick as a cat, to rescue little Will who was afraid to come down.

Tom silenced at Jenny's pleading look and argued no more about her alleged fear of frogs. "I'll wear the hood," he volunteered, gazing adoringly at the seventeen-year-old girl who wore the somber gown of a novice nun, but who was not one, and who, moreover, certainly didn't act like one. Why, last Sunday during the priest's long sermon, Lady Jenny's head had nodded forward, and only Tom's loud, false coughing in the bench behind her had awakened her in time for her to escape detection by the sharp-eyed abbess.