"I do wish you wouldn't call that young man by that foolish name. Suppose he should overhear you?"
"That would be perfectly lovely! He'd put his hand on his heart, and say 'Somebody loves me!'" and Bessie put herself in the supposed tragic attitude.
"You are a dreadful girl. Now, just for a punishment Reynolds shall drive us."
"Then you consent to go?" and Bessie's eagerness confirmed Phebe in her suspicion that it was simply a ruse to get her out.
However, the drive was taken and enjoyed. Instead of the donkey being found in the meadow, there was a blind child groping about on hands and knees for flowers and grasses. "Just look there!" exclaimed Bessie, quite philosophically; "and yet with two eyes of quite the proper sort and power, most of us miss heaps of flowers we might gather."
The meadow was close by a small railway station soon to become an important junction, a new line being under construction which would run into it from quite an opposite direction.
Reynolds drove them to the other side of the line, where some hundreds of men were at work on a long tunnel. The curious little wooden houses in which some of the men lived were inspected, and Phebe had quite a long chat with one of the "gangers."
On their return home Bessie informed Mrs. Colston that the "estate" had some "park-like stretches," and was quite "a suitable site for a summer holiday with the help of a tent." "But it is a shame," she went on, "that it is not on the other side of the railway. Why, if that meadow had only been near that tunnel the railway folks would have given ever so much for it. Don't you think it is too bad?"
"No, I don't."
"You don't! Wouldn't you like Mrs. Waring to make an honest bit of money?"