“Stop, stop!” put in Philippa. “I won’t have the heroines of my youth abused. Each generation offers a spectacle for the next to mock at. Don’t expect to escape yourself, Claudia.”
“Well, they shan’t accuse us of helplessness,” said the girl, serenely. “Can I do anything for you in the town? No? Then, good-bye.”
She settled herself on her bicycle, and rode quietly away. Emily looked vexed.
“She might have taken the other road. Now she will meet them all coming out of the Cathedral.”
“Which she will enjoy,” said Anne, with a smile. “Come, Emily, own that she looks charming. You are a woman of adventure yourself.”
Claudia enjoyed her twenty miles exceedingly. She met and scandalised the Dean’s wife, and made a much more charitable impression upon the Dean himself, who looked after her with a sigh of envy, and a glance at his own gaitered legs. She noted both expressions, laughed, and then her mind flung itself forward with the eagerness with which it always seized upon the future. She pictured Thornbury, its opportunities, its deficiencies, and its altered aspect when she, Claudia, once more took the road back to Elmslie. The people she might meet were not nearly so interesting. The road, however, was neither good nor level, and often she was obliged to confine her attention to its roughnesses. Her real sense of beauty, too, was charmed by the tremulous gladness of the day, soft sunshine veiled in sudden glooms, which yet never became threatening; a hedge-growth rich in ever-varying depths of green; shadows from bordering elms wavering gently on the road, and here and there a gate, a break in the hedge, a twist in the road, opening out some blue distance, not mellow, indeed, with the glory of southern sunshine, but tender as only an English distance can be, and sweet as its remembrance. Claudia was young, vigorous, exultant. When the road climbed so steeply that she was obliged to get off and push her bicycle, it only made a pleasant change for her young strong arms. Every now and then she consulted her map, or, sitting on a stile, glanced at the ripening corn, watched the busy rooks, and ate, with an excellent appetite, the sandwiches supplied by Anne. It was on one of these halts, on the ridge of a hill steeper and stonier than she had yet encountered, that another rider passed her, a man who looked at her keenly. He was thin, sun-browned, and clean-shaven. She criticised his dress and style of riding, without being able to find faults; she noticed, too, that his bicycle had the latest improvements, such as she would hardly have expected to find in these remote regions. Then she glanced at her map. Thornbury was near—the Thornbury which in the glow of exercise she had almost forgotten—and she guessed that he was on his way there. This interested her merely because she looked forward to asking him some questions about his bicycle, which, she owned with a sigh, was better than her own.
Harry, with half a dozen dogs, was waiting for her at the lodge.
“I knew it must be you whom Fenwick described,” he said joyously. “Down, Rob! How splendidly you must have come to be here in this time! I couldn’t have done it.”
“Of course you couldn’t, with that thing of yours,” Claudia said disdainfully. “It’s abominably clumsy. Captain Fenwick—if that’s his name—has a beauty.”
“He’s a clever fellow; he always has the best thing going,” Harry returned with a laugh. “But how jolly it is to have got you here! How’s everybody?”