“I thought it was a very good one. Well, to come back to business, the boys didn’t go by train. Indeed, I don’t think you can, unless you go away round. They hiked.”
“Well, why shouldn’t we, too?” asked Louise.
“Or part of the way, anyway!” added Winnie,
“People would take us for a band of ‘I won’t works!’ We’d look it, too, by the time we got to the end of the journey.”
“But we needn’t do it all at once,” said Winnie. “We could break the journey overnight. Don’t you know, people in England have walking-tours that last for days and days? I’ve read about it. They stop in inns overnight and have adventures.”
“Well, I’d like the adventures, if they didn’t mean falling into ponds and getting your clothes wet,” said Louise.
Winnie yawned.
“I suppose they think we’ve tied the cups round our necks and jumped in,” and she lazily started to get up. “Come on, Louise, let’s find Mrs. Bryan and ask her about camping. She’s sure to know about hikes and everything.”
Finding Mrs. Bryan proved to be hard, because she was not in the kind of a place where you would expect to find a grown-up step-mother. They finally discovered her by a flutter of blue skirt that hung down below the branches of an old apple-tree. She was sitting comfortably in one of its crotches, trying to carve herself a willow whistle.
“Come on up, girls!” she hailed them cheerfully. “There’s always room at the top!”