"It is barely half-past five," I said. But Molly was very determined.
"We must start," she said. "I feel responsible for you, Thecla, for you will have to come back alone."
"As if I could lose my way, when I have only to come straight back the way you take me," I said, "and I have been a bit of that way before."
We were not going by the road but by a short cut, part of which was a foot-path through the fields, and generally, I had driven to Three Corners, so that there was some reason for Molly's carefulness.
"Don't be too sure," she said, "you don't know how like some of the fields are to each other, as well as the lanes. We have regular landmarks we depend upon."
Off we set, in very good spirits, laughing and talking. We laughed and talked a little too much perhaps, for though the very first part of the way was through our own grounds, where I could not of course have gone astray, we soon came to a succession of fields—several of them ploughed land—which certainly were very like each other. We crossed two or three lanes, going a few steps in one direction or the other to get to the gates, and keeping always in the same line ourselves. Suddenly Molly stopped in the middle of a very interesting discussion of a book we had been reading.
"Thecla," she said, "you've come more than half way—you must turn back now, for it will be getting dusk. And oh dear, I didn't point out the old hawthorn at the gate of the great Millside field—and it is so easy to mistake it for Southdown field, and then you'd get all wrong."
"I'm sure I remember it," I said, "and I don't see how I could go wrong if I keep in the same direction."
"Ah, but it's so easy to get out of the same direction without knowing it," she said, "once the sun's gone. Now do be careful," and she repeated a few more warnings.
I kissed her and ran off gaily. For a while all went well. I had crossed two lanes and three grass fields when I found myself for the first time at a loss. Was I to go straight through the gate facing the one I had come out by, or go a little way down the lane? Was this the place to look out for the hawthorn bush? If so, there was no hawthorn bush here, so I decided to go down the lane a little. It seemed a good way before I came to a gate, and when I did, there was no bush or tree of any kind. But I felt sure that up this field was in the right line, so on I went. It was a ploughed field and it really was "up," for it sloped rather steeply. Oh how tired I was when I got to the top! But now I thought all my troubles were over—I had only to go a quarter of a mile along the lane, to reach our own back entrance to the stables.