"I don't believe in it, of course, but I'll try for fun! The Giant King won't get much in the way of a bouquet to-day!"
Quenrede, protesting her scepticism, but all the same palpably enjoying the magic experiment, picked an indifferent nosegay of the few buttercups, hawkweeds, and late pieces of scabious which were the only flowers available. Then she removed her hair-pins, and, letting down a shower of flaxen hair, commenced her winding pilgrimage among the old gray stones. There is a vein of superstition in the most modern of minds, and she was probably following a custom that had come down the ages from the days when our primitive ancestresses clothed themselves in skins and twisted their prehistoric locks with pins of mammoth ivory. In and out and in and out, with Ingred, like an attendant priestess, behind her, she performed the necessary itinerary, and laid her floral offering upon what may have been the remains of a neolithic altar. The pool below was dark and boggy and brown with peat. She took a good-sized pebble, and flung it into the middle with a terrific splash. Ingred, giggling nervously, counted the bubbles.
"A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I—It's 'I,' Queenie! No, there's another! It's 'J'! It's going to be 'J,' old sport! Aren't you thrilled? Oh, I say! Whoever on earth is that?"
Following the direction of her sister's eyes, Quenrede looked through a veil of wind-blown hair, to see, standing among the stones, a stranger of the opposite sex, garbed in tweed knickers and leather gaiters. One glance was enough. The next second she turned, and beat a hurried and ignominious retreat to the sheltered side of the green mound. Ingred, panting in the rear, followed her to cover.
Quenrede, very pink in the face, sat down on a clump of heather and immediately began to put up her hair.
"I never felt such an idiot in my life!" she confided with energy to her sympathetic audience of one. "Ingred! That man knew what I was doing! I saw the horrid amusement in his face. He was laughing at me for all he was worth. I know he was!"
At eighteen it is an overwhelming matter to be laughed at. Quenrede's newly-developed dignity was decidedly wounded.
"After all, it was a very schoolgirlish thing to do," she remarked, sticking in hair-pins as well as she could without a mirror. "Do you think he's still there? I shall stop here till he marches off."
"I'll go and prospect," said Ingred.
She came back with the bad news that not only was the stranger still there, but he was actually in close and apparently familiar conversation with Athelstane and Hereward, who were calling loudly for their sisters, and to confirm her words came distant jodellings of: