"Couldn't we possibly stop here?" implored Verity.
But Miss Strong, having booked rooms in Dropwick, was adamant.
"Besides which I wouldn't trust the beds here," she remarked. "So early in the year they're almost bound to be damp, and we don't want any of you laid up with rheumatic fever as the result of our trip. I prefer to give a wayside inn a week's notice if I mean to sleep there in April. Nobody has had enough coal during the winter to keep fires going in spare bedrooms. That front room was as chilly as a country church! You won't feel so tired, Verity, when you're on your feet again, and it's all downhill to Dropwick."
The Temperance Hotel, where the girls finally stayed their weary feet, was quite modern and unromantic, though well aired and fairly comfortable. Ingred, whom the fates had placed to sleep with Nora, had a trying night, for her obstreperous bedfellow had a habit of flinging out her arms, and of appropriating the larger half of the clothes, leaving poor Ingred to wake shivering. Also, the bed sloped towards the middle, so that both girls had to poise themselves on a kind of hillside, and were constantly rolling down and colliding. These troubles, however, were only incidental in the Pilgrimage, and certainly might have been worse.
On comparing notes at breakfast nearly everybody had had similar experiences. Miss Strong confessed to a patent mattress with a broken spring jutting up in the center, round which she had been obliged to lie in a curve. Linda and Francie had slept near the water-cistern, which alarmed them with weird noises, and Bess and Kitty, trying to open their window wider, had found it lacked sash-cords, and descended like a guillotine, sending the prop that had upheld it, flying into the street. Though they groused at the time, the girls laughed as they discussed these details over the eggs and bacon. The sun was shining and they felt rested, and quite ready once more to shoulder their kit and set out on the march.
There was nothing of very great interest to see in Dropwick itself, though it was a quaint enough old-fashioned market-town, with a fifteenth-century church tower, and a few black and white houses. Miss Strong decided not to waste any time there, but to push on as fast as possible across the hills to Sudbury, where there was a fine Romano-British villa that was well worth a visit. So the foss-way took them up, and up, and up, through fir-woods where the new cones were showing like candles on Christmas trees, and alongside a quarry where they pounced upon some quite interesting fossils in the heaps of stones by the road, and over a craggy weather-worn peak, where, again, they caught the magnificent view of the valley and the river and hills beyond. Then down again, through more fir-woods, where the timber was being felled, and great tree-trunks lay piled in rows one above another, and past banks that were a dream, with starry blackthorn blossom and primroses growing beneath, to where the cross-roads met and the signpost pointed an arm to Sudbury.
The Romans might take their roads straight as an arrow across moor and hill, but they chose out the beauty spots of the land on which to build their villas, and were careful to fix upon a southern aspect and shelter from the prevailing winds. The remains of the old settlement lay behind a farm, and had been carefully excavated by a local antiquarian society. Visitors applied at the farmhouse, entered their names in a book, paid their admission money, and were escorted round by a guide.
Time, and successive conquests, had demolished the greater part of the villa, but its foundations and some of the old brick walls could be plainly traced. The great bath, that indispensable feature of a Roman establishment, could still be seen, with its beautiful tesselated pavement, inlaid with mosaics of doves, cupids, and designs of fruit and flowers. The heating system also, with the leaden pipes and remains of furnaces, was a testimony to the civilization of the period, and the amount of comfort that the legions brought with them into their foreign exile. A large shed had been fitted up as a museum, and held a number of objects that had been dug up during the excavations. The girls, poring over the glass cases, looked with interest at a Roman lady's silver hand-mirror, toilet pots, and tiny shears that must have been the early substitute for scissors. More fascinating still were the toys from a little child's grave, small glass bottles, roughly-made animals of clay, and a carved object that no doubt had been at one time a treasured doll, though now it was crumbling into dust.
Among the pile of broken statues or fragments of ornamental stonework in the corner was a monumental tablet, cracked across in two places, but pieced together for preservation with iron rivets. The inscription ran:
"D.M. Simpliciæ Florentinæ Animæ Innocentissimæ quæ vixit menses decem. Felicius Simplex Pater fecit. Leg. vi, V."