"Billy must do some extra prints, and you could put them in the Magazine," suggested Meg to Gipsy. "You could write an article on 'Mountaineering in Cumberland'. It would be grand, and would make Maude Helm gnash her teeth with envy."
"Perhaps she's been doing something even more exciting to astonish us with," laughed Gipsy. "I wish we could have climbed a real mountain, like Skiddaw."
"Yes, there'd be some credit in that," commented Donald thoughtfully. He said no more at the moment, but a few days afterwards, when the three young people had set out on another cycling expedition, he had an enterprising plan to unfold.
"I vote we ride as far as Ribblethwaite, leave our machines there, and then climb Hawes Fell," he announced. "We've started so early we'd have heaps and loads of time. It would be a thing worth doing! I didn't broach the idea at home because I knew the Mater'd be in such a state of mind, and think we were going to break our necks. It will be time enough to tell about it when we come back. Are you two game to go?"
"Rather!" exclaimed both the girls rapturously.
Gipsy, with her Colonial bringing up and independent American ideas, did not realize any necessity to ask permission for such an expedition. She had been in far wilder places, and considered the Cumberland fells civilized ground compared with portions of the Rockies and certain mountainous tracts of New Zealand with which she was familiar.
If Meg had any qualms of conscience she contrived to quiet them with the comforting assurance: "Dad would have taken us if he hadn't been busy at his office, and we can manage so well ourselves now, we can get on all right without him."
Ribblethwaite was a pretty little village about six miles away, a typical north-country hamlet with its stone cottages, with mullioned windows and flagged stone roofs, its grey turreted church tower, and its quick-flowing, brawling river. It was well wooded, but it stood high, and at this early season of the year the trees were still bare, and only a few green buds showed here and there on the hedges. The gardens were full of golden daffodils and clumps of opening polyanthus; but primroses—which had long been in blossom in the sheltered garden at Briarcroft—were here only venturing into bud. As the inn looked clean and attractive, the three decided to leave their bicycles there, and to have a lunch of ham and eggs and coffee before setting out on their climb.
"Then we can take our sandwiches with us. We're sure to want them up there," said Donald.
"Yes; best to fortify ourselves thoroughly before we start," agreed Meg.