“Worse than that. You grew careful.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch.”
So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.
Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.
“I give it up, Stuart,—no, I’m hanged if I do!” impetuously, meeting his quizzical look.... Then drew back: “I’m not so afraid of you but that I can own to being beaten,” she said.
He had remounted the gate in order to assist her, and now paused to deliberate, a leg on either side the topmost bar: “I wonder if I ought to make you do it, after that.”
Gravely Peter waited, while he hovered on the verge of a blunder.
“No!” and dropping to her side, he quietly raised the wooden latch, and stood aside for her to pass through.
“If I’d noticed that it opened!” she laughed. “Stuart, I’ve found your tombstone epitaph at last.”
“Which is?”