“I should bear a little to the right here, Puppa—you remember the bad place in the road? Not too much, dear....”
Sometimes she cast a worried look behind them, and discerned something on the sky line almost invisible to less anxious eyes.
“Something coming, Puppa.... No, not just yet, dear, but I thought I’d warn you, as it will want to pass us. I suppose they will sound their horn before they get quite close up. Girls, there’s a car coming up behind us.”
Poor General Kendal gripped the wheel tighter and tighter—until, Christopher said, the veins sprang out on the backs of his hands—and drove slower and slower.
“A cart coming towards you, Puppa ... take care, the road is so narrow here ... it’s coming towards us—it’s just a little way in front, isn’t it? Don’t get fussed, dear.”
I have never been out in the General’s car myself, but I believe that he has never become a really confident driver, and that to this day Mumma sits beside him and keeps up a running fire of warnings.
As for the Kendal girls, they go almost everywhere on their bicycles. They say that having too many people in the car always makes poor Puppa so nervous.
Chapter Four
It was Nancy Fazackerly herself who subsequently told me all about her musical evening. She very often comes to see me, and, unlike the Kendals, never causes me to see myself in the unpleasant light of something accomplished, something done, for the good of somebody else’s soul.
The party, it is perhaps needless to say, was invited to come in after supper.