“Father, wouldn’t you like me to drive now, while you have a nice little read?”
“Dear, dear,” said Dr. Carlyon, “I had quite forgotten. But can you drive, squeezed up as you are?”
“It is rather a squash,” sighed Priscilla. “Don’t you think we might have the strap undone, father?”
Her father looked down at them as well as he could for the pink sunshade.
“I think you might,” he said. “I don’t want to take four halves of daughters home to mother. I tell you what we will do: Loveday and her parasol shall sit on the box-seat behind me, with her feet on your seat; then she will be safe, unless she deliberately throws herself out over the back, and I should think that a young woman with a new paint-box and that pretty sunshade would try hard not to.”
Dr. Carlyon made Betsy stand still for a moment across the road, with her nose in the hedge, where she contentedly munched the grass while they re-arranged themselves. Loveday was quite pleased with the change, for she had not been able to hold up her sunshade with any comfort to herself or any one else, so far. If she were not poking it into Priscilla’s eye, she was digging her father in the ear, while if she held it over her shoulder and out behind her, she could not see it, and that, of course, was what she particularly wanted to do. So she gladly took the seat given her, and was not only rid of the strap, but was able to hold her parasol out over the back and stare at it all the time. She thought it threw quite a pretty pink glow over her face; at least, when she shut one eye, and screwed the other round until she could see her own nose, her nose looked quite pink, and if her nose did, of course her face did. She asked Priscilla about it, but Priscilla was busy attending to the arrangement of the rugs and the reins, and then to her driving.
Dr. Carlyon coaxed Betsy out of the hedge, produced a book, and on they went again. It was really very lovely; the sun was shining, but the breeze was cool and soft, and the larks were singing and soaring up, up, up, till nothing was left of them but their voices; then down, down, down, with a swoop and a flutter, until they were so low that the children could see them hovering and darting like big brown musical butterflies. The scent of clover wafted out from the fields, and of honeysuckle from the hedges.
“Oh, I am so glad I was born,” exclaimed Priscilla, with a deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction.
Dr. Carlyon smiled.
“I hope you will always say the same, and in that same voice, Prissy,” he said. “Now, what shall we read? I have the ‘Ingoldsby Legends’ here; shall I read to you about the Babes in the Wood?”