"Let's leave the tip on the table," suggested Ted impatiently.
"My dear fellow," replied Ned, "I won't go without seeing the 'General,' and thanking her for that excellent pie. Besides--think how she simply scooped us up last night like half-drowned kittens and set us going again! I tell you, sir, that if--it being Saturday night--she had suggested washing my head, I'd have submitted meekly, as I used with old nurse. Why! I dreamt about frilled drawers all last night!"
Ted was irresponsive; a word had arrested his attention. "Saturday!" he echoed thoughtfully, "then to-day is Sunday!"
"First Sunday after Whitsun--No! Trinity Sunday, of course, the shortest night in the year and Midsummer Night's Dream all combined. How time flies...."
"What luck!" gloomed Ted. "I shouldn't wonder if the smith were to refuse us our cycles--they are like that in these wild parts--what beastly bad luck!"
Here Ned, who had been prospecting at the back of the passage, opened a door, suspecting it to be possibly a coal-cellar; but he fell back from the sudden blaze of almost blinding sunlight which poured in from a long, low, absolutely empty room, which stretched away on either side over boards scrubbed to whiteness to a wide oriel window.
At that on the left-hand side stood a parrot-perch, beside which was a tall girl in blue engaged in making a white cockatoo with a yellow crest talk.
"Gimme a sixpence," it muttered hurriedly as the bit of banana turned away with the girl at the interruption.
So for a second or two they stood; the two young men smitten helpless by the extreme beauty of that girlish figure, framed as it was by the great sprays of white June clematis and great trusses of scarlet ivy geranium from the garden beyond the window.
"Gimme a sixpence, gimme a sixpence," reiterated the cockatoo in guttural allurement. Then the girl smiled.