Miss Heap sat with her hands in her lap, staring. Mrs. Ridding, her mind blocked by aspic, wasn't receiving impressions. She gazed with heavy eyes straight in front of her. There she saw cars. Many cars. All stopped at this particular spot. With a dull sensation of fathomless fatigue she dimly wondered at them.
"Looks as though it's a hostelry," said Mr. Ridding, who remembered his Dickens; and he blinked up, craning his head out, at the signboard, on which through a gap in the branches of the pepper trees a shaft of brilliant late afternoon sun was striking. "Don't see one, though."
He jerked his thumb. "Up back of the trees there, I reckon," he said.
Then he prepared to open the door and go and have a look.
A hand shot out of Miss Heap's lap at him. "Don't," she said quickly. "Don't, Mr. Ridding."
There was a little green gate in the thick hedge that grew behind the pepper trees, and some people he knew, who had been in the car in front, were walking up to it. Some other people he knew had already got to it, and were standing talking together with what looked like leaflets in their hands. These leaflets came out of a green wooden box fastened on to one of the gate-posts, with the words Won't you take one? painted on it.
Mr. Ridding naturally wanted to go and take one, and here was Miss Heap laying hold of him and saying "Don't."
"Don't what?" he asked looking down at her, his hand on the door.
"Hello Ridding," called out one of the people he knew. "No good getting out. Show doesn't open till to-morrow at four. Can't get in to-day. Gate's bolted. Nothing doing."
And then the man detached himself from the group at the gate and came over to the car with a leaflet in his hand.