"Well?" she said. "Go on! I say I richly deserved it. Go on!"
"Go on where?" I asked testily. "You're not expecting me to say you didn't, are you?"
"No, I'm not," she said, "but it was good practice trying to make you." So saying, she slipped her hand under my arm again, and we stepped it out together.
The current of her thoughts now ran and glittered in the opposite direction. She made me for the moment her intimate, lifting up the veil over her past life, and giving me peeps and vistas of her wanderings and experiences. She jested and gibed. She sang little snatches of song in some foreign tongue. "You're sure you don't understand Italian?" she demanded, stopping short half-way through a bar, and quizzing me with her eyes, now blue as sapphires in the bright sunshine.
"Not a word of it," said I.
"A grave disadvantage," she said airily. "It's the only language one can love in." And off she struck again.
Now she sang something soothing and sad, with a wistful lilt in it that died into a low wail. It needed no Italian to be understood, for it was written in the language of human experience. A woman's heart throbbed in the lilt and broke in the wail.
This sweet interval of intimacy verging on friendship was ended by our close approach to the main road. We had been travelling, heedless of roads and tracks, across a champaign country, and the slope up to the top of Yarlet Bank now lay before us. I led the way, skulking behind such poor cover as the gaunt hedgerows provided, and, when only a hundred paces from the top, I asked her to crouch down, awaiting my signal to advance, while I crept forward on my hands and knees to the edge of the road which here climbed the brow of the hill through a deep cutting, along either margin of which ran a straggling hedge.
To my relief, the road down the hill, both to right and left, was completely deserted. I joyfully waved my arm to Mistress Waynflete, who was soon by my side, looking down the road. To the right we could see for nearly a mile. On the left our view was cut short by a bend, and I walked a score of yards in that direction and shinned up a stout sapling. Our luck was absolute. Not a soldier, not a living soul, was in sight.
"We might have had to skulk here for hours, waiting for an opportunity to cross unseen," said I, on rejoining her, "but our gods above are victorious, and we share their victory. So now for the 'Ring of Bells.' There's a gate at the bottom of the hill. Come along, Mistress Waynflete!"