She lowered her head, looking up through her lashes.
“They’re very strong little legs, and if you talk to me and talk to me, so that I forget—— If I get very tired, I’ll let you carry me.”
They struck into fields again, clambering through hedges and over gates, judging their direction by the road. Teddy was afraid to keep to the road lest they should meet Farmer Joseph coming back from market, or lest Mrs. Sarie, when she missed them, should send some one driving after them to bring them back.
It was pleasant in the fields. Rambling along, they almost lost their sense of danger and forgot they were escaping. Everything living seemed so friendly. Crickets in the grass chirped cheerily. Birds jumped out of their houses, leaving their doors wide open, Teddy said, to see them pass. He invented stories about the things they saw to prevent the little legs from thinking of their tiredness. Only the cows suspected them of escaping; they whisked their tails and blinked their eyes disapprovingly, like grandmothers who had had too many calves to be deceived by a pair of children.
Lunch time came and they grew hungry, but to buy food at a farmhouse was too risky.. They quenched their thirst at a stream and pictured to themselves the enormous meal they would eat when they got to London.
“Tired?”
“No. I’m not tired.”
“Let’s pretend I’m your war-horse,” he suggested.
The finger went up to her mouth. “That’ll be just playing; it won’t be the same as saying that I’m tired.”
He assured her that it wouldn’t; so she consented to straddle his neck, clasping his forehead with her sticky little hands while he held her legs to help her keep her balance.