The two girls had not been accustomed to much discipline at home, and their notions of school rules were rudimentary. The idea of getting up so early and going out to explore struck them both as delightfully enterprising and adventurous. They made a hurried toilet, crept cautiously downstairs, and found the passage at the back of the house, where their bicycles had been temporarily placed the night before. It was an easy matter to unbolt a side door, and make their way through the garden and down the drive. Before the day was much older, they were riding along the quiet dim road in that calm silence that precedes the dawn. The air was most fresh and exhilarating. As their machines sped through the grey morning mist, they felt almost as if they were on aeroplanes, rushing among the clouds. At first all was dark and vague and mysterious, but every minute the light was growing stronger, and presently they could distinguish the gossamer, hung like a tangled magic web upon the hedges, in dainty shimmering masses, as if the pixies had been spinning and weaving in the night, and had not yet had time to carry off the result of their labours.
"It's just like a fairy tale," said Gwethyn. "Do you remember the boy who sat on the fox's tail, and they went on and on till his hair whistled in the wind? Those rabbits ought to stop and talk, and tell us about Brer Terrapin and the Tar Baby. I'm sure Uncle Remus is squatting at the foot of that tree. We shall meet the goose-girl presently, I expect."
"What a baby you are! But it is lovely, I agree with you. Oh, Gwethyn, look at the sky over there! That's a fairy tale, if you like. Let's stop and watch it."
It was indeed a glorious sight. The colour, which at first had been pearly-grey, had changed to transparent opal; then, blushing with a warmer hue, grew slowly to pink, amber, and violet. Great streamers of rosy orange began to stretch like ethereal fingers upwards from the horizon. The fields were in shadow, and a quiet stillness reigned, as if the world paused, waiting in hope and expectancy for that fresh and ever wonderful vision, the miracle of the returning dawn. Then the great shimmering, glowing sun lifted himself up from among the mists in the meadows, gaining in brilliance with every foot he ascended till the light burst out, a flood of brightness, and all the landscape was radiant. At that, Mother Earth seemed to bestir herself. With the new day came the fresh pulse of life, and the reawakening of myriads of nature's children. The first lark went soaring into the purply-blue overhead; the chaffinches began to tweet in the elms; a white butterfly fluttered over the hedge; and a marvellous busy throng of insect life seemed suddenly astir and ahum. It was a different world from that of an hour before—a living, breathing, working, rejoicing world; the shadows and the mystery had fled, and left it as fair as if just created.
"It was worth getting up for this!" said Katrine. "I've never seen such a transformation scene in my life. I wish I could paint it. But what colours could one use? Nothing but stained glass could give that glowing, glorious, pinky violet!"
"I haven't the least idea where we are, or how far away from the school," said Gwethyn. "We rode along quite 'on spec.', and we may have come two miles or five, for anything I know. Yes, it has been lovely, and I see you're still wrapt in a sort of rapturous dream, and up among rosy clouds, but I've come down to earth, and I'm most unromantically hungry. It seems years since we had supper last night. I wonder if we couldn't find a farm, and buy some milk."
"Rose madder mixed with violet lake, and a touch of aureolin and Italian pink might do it!" murmured Katrine.
"No, it wouldn't! They'd want current coin of the realm. Have you any pennies left in your coat pocket?"
"You mundane creature! I was talking of the sunrise, and not of mere milk. Yes, I have five pennies and a halfpenny, which ought to buy enough to take a bath in."
"I don't want a bath, only a glassful. But it's a case of 'first catch your farm'. I don't see the very ghost of a chimney anywhere, nothing but fields and trees."