“We could hardly help being good walkers,” said Sophy, rather discontentedly. “Walking is our only amusement.”
Hetty and Peggy clapped their hands. “Bexley Hill, Bexley Hill,” they cried; “hands up for Bexley Hill.”
There were no hands lifted, but they all turned into the lane.
“We can go a little way just to look at the view,” assented Eve; and the younger girls went skipping off in their short petticoats, and the two elder girls were speedily absorbed in Mr. Tivett’s animated conversation, and Eve and Vansittart were walking alone.
“A little way.” Who could measure distance or count the minutes in such an exhilarating atmosphere as breathed around that wooded hillside in the balmy April morning? Every step seemed to take them into a finer air, and to lift their hearts with an increasing gladness. All around them rippled the sea of furze and heather, broken by patches of woodland, and grassy glades that were like bits stolen out of the New Forest, and flung down here upon this swelling hillside. Here and there a squatter’s cottage, with low cob wall and steep tiled roof, stood snug and sheltered in its bit of garden, under the shadow of a venerable beech or oak—here and there a little knot of children sprawled and sunned themselves in front of a cottage door. The rest was silence and solitude, save for the voices of those rare birds which inhabit forest and common land.
“Gussie,” whispered Vansittart, when they had passed one of these humble homesteads, and were ascending the crest of the hill, “do you think you could contrive to lose yourself—and the girls—for half an hour?”
“Of course I can. You will have to cooey for us when you want to see our faces again.”
This little conversation occurred in the rear of the five girls, who had scattered themselves over the hillside, every one believing in her own particular track as the briefest and best ascent.
Eve had climbed highest of all the sisters, by a path so narrow, and so hemmed in by bramble and hawthorn, that only one, and that one a dexterous climber, could mount at a time.
Vansittart followed her desperately, pushing aside the brambles with his stick. He was breathless when he reached the top, where she stood lightly poised, like Mercury. The ascent, since he stopped to speak to Tivett, had taken only ten minutes or so, but when he looked round him and downward over the billowy furze and rugged hillside there was not one vestige of Augustus Tivett or the four Miss Marchants in view.