"Oh dear!" said she, "I do believe it's going to rain."
Even as she spoke the first big tears of the dejected day fell on the lid of the teapot.
"We must hurry," he said, briskly. "I can't have my princess getting wet through and catching cold in her royal head. Run for it, Princess! Run to the big gateway!"
She ran; he followed with the basket, went out to cover the seats of his car with mackintosh rugs and put up the hood, and came back, dampish, to discuss the situation. They told each other that it was only a shower, that it couldn't possibly, as they put it, have "set in." But it had; the landscape framed in the arch of the gateway lost color moment by moment, even the yellow of the gorse was blotted and obscured; the rain, which at first had fallen in a fitful, amateurish sort of way, settled down to business and fell in gray, diagonal lines, straight and sharp as ramrods.
"And it's getting late," he said, "and your Highness will be hungry."
"We've only just had tea," she reminded him.
"Ah, but we've got some way to go," he told her.
"Where are we going?"
"I had thought," he said, "of going to a place beyond Eastbourne; . . . my old nurse lives there. She's rather fond of me; . . . she'll have gotten supper for us. I thought you'd like it. It's a farm-house, rather a jolly one, and then I thought, if you liked, we could drive back to the Eastbourne hotel by moonlight."